Experiments and Analysis on Stability of the Sandwich Structures with Soft Core.

In this paper, first a complete buckling experiment of the sandwich beams with the foam core is carried out, which includes the manufacturing of specimens and their experimental verification. Second, a refined sinusoidal zig-zag theory (RSZT) is established, which can describe the zig-zag effect during the in-plane compression of sandwich beam and accommodate the transverse shear free surface boundary conditions. Based on the established model combined with Hu–Washizu variational principle, a two-node beam element has been developed to address the buckling problem of the sandwich beams. Thus, the established beam element is able to accommodate interlaminar continuous conditions of transverse shear stress. Several examples have been investigated to validate the accuracy of the established method. The comparative analysis of the results including experimental data, the results acquired from three-dimensional finite element (3D-FEM) and diverse models has been made. Comparative analysis shows that the accurate buckling loads can be acquired from the established model. Nevertheless, other models discarding the continuous conditions of transverse stresses among the adjacent layers largely overestimate the critical loads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]