Abstract
This work has been conducted to investigate the instability and post-instability response of rotating nanocomposite beams because of buckling incidence in thermal environment. The carbon nanotube has been employed to reinforce the matrix phase. The temperature dependency has been considered as a characteristic of the material properties of the matrix and reinforcing phases. A constant temperature change in the direction of the beam thickness has been assumed. The Reddy's third order shear deformation theory has been used to incorporate the shearability to the governing equations. A modified law of mixtures on the basis of the micro-mechanical model has been utilized to determine the thermo-mechanical properties of the beam. With the purpose of discretizing the governing equations, the Ritz method has been applied to the nonlinear governing equations. Two effective algorithms have been presented to study the buckling behaviour and the post-buckling amplitude of the mid-span of the beam. With the aim of clarifying the effects of the carbon nanotube distribution pattern, the rotation speed, the hub radius and the kind of boundary condition on the critical temperature as well as the mid-span amplitude after the buckling incidence of the rotating beam, the necessary results are presented. The results show that at a certain critical temperature, with increasing the rotational speed, the response amplitude after the buckling of simply-clamped nanocomposite beams decreases, while the opposite trend is observed for clamped-simply nanocomposite beams. In addition, increasing the rotational speed does not necessarily reduce the critical temperature of the buckling of simply-clamped nanocomposite beams.