Performance of sandwich plates with truss cores

Sandwich plates with truss cores fashioned from straight struts have distinct advantages relative to other constructions, including those with honeycomb cores. In addition to opportunities afforded by their open architecture, the truss core sandwich plates meet or exceed the load carrying capacity of other competitive constructions. The weight of truss core sandwich plates subject to a crushing stress and arbitrary combinations of bending and transverse shear are optimized subject to buckling and plastic yielding constraints and then compared with the weight performance of other types of optimized plates. Several issues central to the optimization process are addressed by a fundamental model study. These include the relation of designs based on a pure moment loading to those based on combined moment and transverse shear and the accuracy needed to model the various modes of buckling that must be taken into account in the design process. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.