Abstract
Thermal deformations in cross-ply laminated shells are investigated. The state space approach is used to generate exact solutions for the thermoelastic response of cross-ply spherical, cylindrical and doubly curved shells for various boundary conditions and subjected to general temperature field. The shells possess two parallel edges simply supported and the remaining ones having any possible combination of boundary conditions: free, clamped or simply supported. A rigorous thick deep first order shear deformation shell theory is used in the analysis. Deflections are computed for shells with various boundary conditions undergoing uniform and linearly varying temperature through the thickness. The exact solutions for thermal deflections can be used as benchmarks for approximate solutions such as Rayleigh-Ritz and finite element methods.