Recent developments in the modeling and behavior of advanced sandwich constructions: a survey

A general overview of some recent developments related with the modeling and stability of sandwich structures is presented in this paper. The survey covers a number of issues related with the geometrically linear and non-linear formulations of curved and flat sandwich constructions featuring laminated anisotropic face sheets, and associated stability problems. Issues related with the enhancement of the load carrying capacity of sandwich panels resulting in the increase of the buckling strength, the reduction of the intensity of a snap-through buckling and even of its removal are also addressed. The provided list of references is not exhaustive, in the sense that it is mainly connected with topics of sandwich constructions in which the first author of this paper has been involved during a good part of his research activity. Moreover, the displayed results illustrating some basic trends concern not only the ones previously obtained by the authors of this survey-paper, but also several others, presented here for the first time. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.