Nonuniform Heat Effects on Buckling of Laminated Composite Beam: Experimental Investigations

The influence of nonuniform heating on the critical buckling temperature of laminated glass-epoxy composite beam has been investigated experimentally with the help of a novel experimental setup. The beam is numerically investigated using nonlinear finite element analysis. An initial geometric imperfection is introduced to the modeled geometry in numerical technique to have an experimental–numerical comparison of temperature-deflection plot. The results indicate that the critical buckling temperature of a uniformly heated beam has a significant difference in comparison to the nonuniformly heated beam and it depends on the heating source location and the resulting temperature distribution along the length direction of the beam.