5th International Congress on Computational Mechanics and Simulation, 10-13 December 2014, India ANALYSIS OF SANDWICH FGM PLATES USING A FOUR NODE QUADRILATERAL ELEMENT BASED ON THIRD ORDER THEORY M. YAQOOB YASIN, SANTOSH KAPURIA and MAYANK PATNI Department of Applied Mechanics, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Hauz Khas, New Delhi, India. E-mail: yaqoob.yasin@gmail.com This paper presents the static and free vibration analysis of functionally graded material sandwich plates using an improved discrete Kirchhoff quadrilateral element based on the third order theory. The top and bottom faces of the sandwich plate are made from metal and ceramic respectively. The core of the sandwich plate is made from functionally graded material (FGM) whose properties vary continuously along the thickness direction. The effective properties of the FGM core are obtained using the Mori-Tanaka method, which accounts for the interactions among the adjecent inclusions. The results obtained from the present analysis has been compared with the published results. Keywords: Sandwich FGM; quadrilateral element; third order theory. Introduction Functionally graded materials (FGMs) belong to the family of composite materials which are manufactured by mixing two or more constituent phases with continuous or step wise variation of volume fraction/properties of the constituent materials in the desired direction (Kieback et al., 2003). This continuous variation of the material properties in FGMs makes them suitable for making components operated in high temperature environment such as nuclear power reactors and gas turbine engine blades etc, where the conventional multilayered structure systems fail due to cracking and delamination (Jha et al., 2012). A large body of literature is available on the theoretical modelling and analysis of FGM structures. The modelling is subdivided into kinematic modelling of the plate (displacement field across the thickness direction) and homogenization technique (estimation of the effective material properties). For estimating the effective properties of FGM, a variety of microme- chanical models have been developed. Voigt’s rule of mixture (ROM) (Neves et al. 2013), the Mori-Tanaka model (MTM) (Gilhooley et al., 2007) and the self-consistent method (SCM) (Vel and Batra 2004) are most commonly employed. The ROM does not account for the interactions between the elastic fields of neighboring particulate phases, and hence gives inaccurate results when the volume fractions of one phase is not too low. The MTM accounts for this interaction and has been shown to yield accurate prediction for composites with a well-defined continuous matrix and a discontinuous particulate phase. We adopt the MTM in this study. In these 101 c 2014 ICCMS Organisers. Published by Research Publishing. All rights reserved. ISBN:978-981-09-1139-3 || doi:10.3850/978-981-09-1139-3 102