Open Access

ARTICLE

Vibration and Buckling of Truss Core Sandwich Plates on An Elastic Foundation Subjected to Biaxial In-plane Loads

by J.W. Chen¹, W. Liu¹, X.Y. Su¹

1 Peking Univ, LTCS and Dept Mech & Aero Engn, Coll Engn, Beijing 100871, China.
2 Corresponding author, Email address: xyswsk@pku.edu.cn (X.Y. Su).

Computers, Materials & Continua 2011, 24(2), 163-182. https://doi.org/10.3970/cmc.2011.024.163

Abstract

Truss-core sandwich plates are thin-walled structures comprising a truss core and two thin flat sheets. Since no direct analytical solution for the dynamic response of such structures exists, the complex three dimensional (3D) systems are idealized as equivalent 2D homogeneous continuous plates. The macroscopic effective bending and transverse shear stiffness are derived. Two representative core topologies are considered: pyramidal truss core and tetrahedral truss core. The first order shear deformation theory is used to study the flexural vibration of a simply supported sandwich plate. The buckling of the truss core plate on an elastic foundation subjected to biaxial in-plane compressive loads is also investigated. It's found that the lowest buckling loads and modes are dependent on the foundation stiffness as well as bending and transverse shear stiffness of the plate. The geometric parameters of a sandwich plate are optimized to obtain strongest buckling resistance per unit weight. To verify the accuracy of analytical solutions, 3D finite element (FE) models are established, and good agreement is observed between them. It's obvious that the homogenization procedure leads to great savings in computational effort.

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