Thermal analysis for laminated plates with arbitrary supports under non-uniform temperature boundary conditions.

• Thermo-elastic solutions for laminated plates with different supports are derived. • The method is suit for composite plates with arbitrary thickness and layer numbers. • The influences of physical and geometric parameters are thoroughly investigated. This paper aims to investigate thermal behaviors of composite laminated plates with different supports under non-uniform temperature boundary conditions. The thermo-elastic solutions of temperature, displacements, and stresses for the laminated plate with arbitrary layer numbers and thickness are obtained based on the three-dimensional theory of thermoelasticity. By applying the Fourier law of heat conduction and the thermoelastic equations, the state-space equations are established by employing the temperature, heat flux, displacements, and stresses as state variables without the hypothesis of displacement form. The differential quadrature method is introduced to discretize the in-plane state variables. On the basis of the continuities of state variables at the interfaces in the laminated plate, the relationships of temperature, heat flux, displacements, and stresses between the top and bottom surfaces can be derived. By simultaneously considering temperature and mechanical boundary conditions applied to the surfaces of the laminated plate, the initial state variables for temperature, displacements, and stresses can be determined uniquely. The errors in the temperature, displacements and stresses resulting from the differential quadrature method can be eliminated by incrementally augmenting the number of sampling points in the convergence study. The accuracy of the present method is thoroughly verified by comparing the current results with both the finite element solutions and the findings reported in previous literature. Finally, the influences of surface temperature, length-to-thickness ratios, material properties, layer numbers, and support types for the distributions of the temperature field, displacements, and stresses in the laminated plate are discussed in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]