Thermal Buckling of Composite Sandwich Plates.

By considering that the total transverse displacement of a sandwich plate is the sum of the displacement due to bending of the plate and that due to shear deformation of the core, a 36-degree-of-freedom, high precision, higher-order triangular plate element was developed for the thermal buckling analysis of a rectangular composite sandwich plate. Numerical results show that the buckling mode that a sandwich plate will buckle into is dependent on the fiber orientation in the faces and the aspect ratio of the plate. For the square sandwich plate with angle-ply laminated faces, the highest critical buckling temperature is obtained with fibers orientated at 45°. For the rectangular [(±θ)2/core]s sandwich plate with an aspect ratio greater than 2, orientating the fibers in the faces to an angle around 63° will give the highest critical buckling temperature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]