Functionally graded material properties for disks and rotors

The concept of functionally graded materials opens up more opportunity to further tailor material usage for specific applications than is possible by even the traditional composite material technology. It becomes ideally possible to keep shapes of components relatively simple whilst exploiting tailored spatial distribution of microstructure and material properties to control deformation and stresses in the component. This paper presents the use of numerical methods to assess the effect of various forms of gradation of material properties to control deformation and stresses in rotating axisymmetric components such as disks and rotors.