Non-Fourier heat transfer analysis of sandwich conical shells with GPLs reinforced face sheets and porous core under moving heat flux

• Analyzing the thermal behavior of nanocomposite sandwich conical shells under moving heat flux. • GPLs reinforced face sheets and porous core nanocomposite sandwich shell is considered. • The non-Fourier heat conduction is employed. • The DQM and the NURBS based multi-step technique are used as the solution technique. • It is found the GPLs weight fractions greatly affect the thermal responses of shell. In this work, as a first attempt, the thermal behavior of nanocomposite sandwich conical shells under internal axisymmetric moving heat flux based on the non-Fourier heat transfer is investigated. In order to capture the influences of the finite heat wave speed, the hyperbolic heat transfer equation is used. The face sheets of the nanocomposite sandwich shell are made of graphene platelets (GPLs) reinforced polymer matrix. The core layer is fabricated from a GPLs reinforced porous composite material. In both core layer and face sheets, GPLs have uniform distribution and random orientation. Through a two-dimensional layerwise approach, the differential quadrature method (DQM) and the nonuniform rational basis spline (NURBS) curves based multi-step technique are employed to discretize the governing equations in the spatial and temporal domains, respectively. The performance of the present method is demonstrated by performing convergence study and comparing the results in the limit cases with those reported in literature. Following the approach validation, parametric studies are carried out to elucidate the influences of heat flux speed, porosity distribution and amounts, GPLs weight fractions and the shell-thickness-to-length ratio on the thermal responses of the sandwich conical shells under investigation. The results show that the speed of moving heat flux and GPLs weight fractions have significant effects on the thermal responses of the shells. But the porosity distribution and amounts have less effect on the thermal behavior of the shell. In addition, the increase of the heat flux speed decreases the traveled distance by the heat wave front and the increase of the weight fraction of GPLs increases the heat wave speed.