Thermal buckling and postbuckling of edge-cracked functionally graded multilayer graphene nanocomposite beams on an elastic foundation

•Thermal buckling of cracked functionally graded GPLRC beams is studied.•Thermal postbuckling of cracked functionally graded GPLRC beams is investigated.•FG-X distribution gives the best buckling resistance and postbuckling performance.•Elastic foundation makes functionally graded GPLRC less sensitive to the crack. This paper investigates thermal buckling and postbuckling behaviors of functionally graded graphene nanoplatelet (GPL)-reinforced composite multilayer beams containing an open edge crack and resting on a Pasternak-type elastic foundation based on the first-order shear deformation beam theory including von Kármán geometric nonlinearity. The material properties of functionally graded GPL-reinforced composites (GPLRCs), which exhibit piece-wise variation along the thickness direction, are evaluated using micromechanics based models. The bending stiffness of the cracked section is estimated by the rotational spring model. The obtained nonlinear partial differential equations of equilibrium are discretized by the differential quadrature method, and then an iterative method is used to obtain the thermal buckling loads and postbuckling load-deflection curves. Detailed parametric studies are conducted to investigate the effects of crack length, GPL distribution pattern, GPL weight fraction, GPL length-to-width and length-to-thickness ratios, boundary conditions, and foundation stiffnesses on the thermal buckling loads and postbuckling response of the cracked GPLRC beams.