Bending Analysis of Composite Sandwich Plates with Laminated Face Sheets: New Finite Element Formulation

The bending behavior of composites sandwich plates with multi-layered laminated face sheets has been investigated, using a new four-nodded rectangular finite element formulation based on a layer-wise theory. Both, first order and higher-order shear deformation; theories are used in order to model the face sheets and the core, respectively. Unlike any other layer-wise theory, the number of degrees of freedom in this present model is independent of the number of layers. The compatibility conditions as well as the displacement continuity at the interface ‘face sheets–core’ are satisfied. In the proposed model, the three translation components are common for the all sandwich layers, and are located at the mid-plane of the sandwich plate. The obtained results show that the developed model is able to give accurate transverse shear stresses directly from the constitutive equations. Moreover, a parametric study was also conducted to investigate the effect of certain characteristic parameters (core thickness to total thickness ratio, side-to-thickness ratio, boundary conditions, plate aspect ratio, core-to-face sheet anisotropy ratio, core shear modulus to the flexural modulus ratio and degree of orthotropy of the face sheet) on the transverse displacement variation. The numerical results obtained by our model are compared favorably with those obtained via analytical solution and numerical/experimental, results obtained by other models. The results obtained from this investigation will be useful for a more comprehensive understanding of the behavior of sandwich laminates.