He X.

Nonlinear deformation can occur in thin laminated structures due to thermal fields present in the laminates. Thermally induced laminate response in buckling and vibration has been previously studied in nonlinear dynamics by using Berger’s approximation to reduce the governing equation of motion to an ordinary differential equation that compromises the total energy. In this paper, we study the nonlinear thermal vibration using a generalized Galerkin’s method, without using Berger’s approximation. We obtain the equations of motion for laminates in orthotropic and isotropic structures in a thermal buckling and thermal vibration for both simply supported and clamped boundary conditions in a decoupled modal form Duffing equation, with consideration of both non-uniform in-plane and transverse temperature variations in a steady state and a transient state. Chaos and instability due to the steady-state thermal field as well as the transient diffusion are investigated.