Thermal buckling of embedded sandwich piezoelectric nanoplates with functionally graded core by a nonlocal second-order shear deformation theory

The effective elastic-piezoelectric properties of nanostructures have been shown to be strongly size-dependent. In this paper, a nonlocal second-order shear deformation formulation is presented to study the size-dependent thermal buckling of embedded sandwich piezoelectric nanoplates with functionally graded core. Temperature is considered as uniform and nonlinear distributions across plate’s thickness direction. Based on the developed nonlocal second-order shear deformation theory, the size-dependent equations of motion are derived. The nonlocal thermal buckling responses of simply supported nanoplates are solved via Navier method. The reliability of present approach is verified by comparing the existing results provided in the open literature. The influences of nonlocal parameter, gradient index, electric voltage, and Winkler–Pasternak parameters on the thermal buckling characteristics of functionally graded nanoplates are examined.