Nanocomposite Plates and Shells Reinforced by Agglomerated Carbon Nanotubes: Static and Dynamic Analysis

The development of nanofibers, such as Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs), captured the interest of many researchers, who aimed to take advantage of these constituents by using them as reinforcing phase in the so-called nanocomposite structures. Since their discovery, a huge number of papers related to this topic appeared in the open literature. All these works highlighted the excellent mechanical and thermal properties of CNTs by presenting different possible applications. The most typical example is related to the class of functionally graded carbon nanotube-reinforced laminated composite Nevertheless, different approaches were published to evaluate their properties. In this paper, a micromechanics model based on the agglomeration of such nanofibers is employed to compute the overall mechanical behavior of laminated composite plates and shells reinforced by CNTs. The static and dynamic analysis of these nanostructures are accomplished numerically, by means of the well-known Generalized Differential Quadrature (GDQ) method. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of the agglomeration of CNTs on the linear static response and on the natural frequencies of this structures.