Thermo-elastic solutions for multilayered wide plates and beams with interfacial imperfections through the transfer matrix method

A matrix technique is formulated to efficiently solve stationary two-dimensional thermo-elasticity problems in simply supported multilayered beams and plates with an arbitrary number of layers which may be in imperfect mechanical and thermal contact. The method uses local transfer matrices and continuity conditions at the layer interfaces to establish explicit relationships between the unknown integration constants in the solution of a generic layer and those of the first layer. Explicit expressions are then derived for temperature, displacements and stresses through the imposition of the boundary conditions at the top and bottom surfaces of the plate. The dimensionless expressions allow to easily generate exact solutions, also for plates with many layers and interfacial thermal and mechanical imperfections. The solutions can be used for parametric analyses, to investigate the influence of the inhomogeneous material structure and interfacial imperfections on local fields or to verify the accuracy of approximate theories and numerical models.