Vibration and buckling analyses of FGM plates with multiple internal defects using XIGA-PHT and FCM under thermal and mechanical loads

In this paper, the vibration and buckling analyses of the FGM (functionally graded material) plates with multiple internal cracks and cutouts under thermal and mechanical loads are numerically investigated using the combined XIGA-PHT (extended isogeometric analysis based on PHT-splines) and FCM (finite cell method). Material properties are graded only in the thickness direction. The effective material properties are estimated by using either the rule of mixture or the Mori-Tanaka homogenization technique. The plate displacement field is based on the HSDT (higher-order shear deformation plate theory) without any requirement of the SCF (shear correction factor). The HSDT model can exactly represent the shear stress distribution and improve the accuracy of solutions. The PHT-splines can naturally fulfill the C¹-continuous requirement of the HSDT model. The representation of internal defects is mesh-independent. The discontinuous and singular phenomena induced by the cracks are captured using the enrichment pattern in the XIGA, and the influence of cutouts is implemented by the FCM. The geometries of cutouts are captured by means of adaptive quadrature procedure based on a simple unfitted structural mesh, which avoids the need for multiple patches to describe the complex geometry and eliminates the enforcement of C¹-continuity patch-coupling across the patch boundaries. The initial mesh density around the cracks and cutouts can be controlled flexibly utilizing the local refinement property of the PHT-splines. After validating the results of the developed approach with those available in the literature, the effects of material gradient index, side to thickness ratio, boundary conditions, cutout size and crack length on the normalized frequency and the critical buckling parameter are investigated. Numerical results illustrate the effectiveness and accuracy of the present approach.