Bending and buckling analysis of corrugated composite sandwich plates

In this paper, bending and buckling behavior under uniaxial load of corrugated soft-core sandwich plates with laminated composite face sheets are explored. To this aim, analyses via three-dimensional finite element method are performed using ANSYS 12.0. The core is assumed as a soft isotropic material completely bonded to two stiff laminated composite face sheets. In particular, linear uniaxial critical buckling loads of sandwich plates with sinusoidal and trapezoidal corrugation are analyzed. The through-thickness displacement, normal and shear stresses at the important points of the sandwich plates under uniform transverse loading conditions are obtained. A series of numerical solutions are performed to study the contribution of corrugation shape, face sheet lay-up architecture, boundary conditions and length/thickness ratio of the plate on the bending behavior and linear uniaxial buckling loads of the sandwich plates. For the sake of verification, the linear uniaxial critical buckling loads of the corrugated sandwich plates are then compared with those of flat sandwich plates previously reported in the literatures. It has been shown that the linear uniaxial buckling capacity of sandwich plates is considerably improved by introducing corrugation on both face sheets. The improvement was found to be more significant in the case of trapezoidal corrugation than that of sinusoidal one. Moreover, comparing with corrugated sandwich plates, the contribution of the lay-up architecture to linear uniaxial critical buckling load was negligible in the case of plates with constant thickness.