ABSTRACT
All practical structures are subjected to changes in temperature and to thermal gradients. Therefore, it is necessary to understand, plan for, and include thermal effects in the design and analysis of sandwich structures. In particular, during the processing of most composites they are subjected to a thermal environment due to both the manufacturing process and the exothermal chemical reaction in curing the resin. For transient solutions for the thermal and moisture gradients for a sandwich structure one must account for the thermal properties of the face and core materials. To investigate the thermal effects on a structure, it is convenient to first look at a single layer rectangular plate of an isotropic material. In many problems involving thermoelastic plates, it is seen that the boundary conditions are nonhomogeneous. Why is this important? In solving linear partial differential equations, separation of variables cannot be used with nonhomogeneous boundary conditions.
