Buckling analysis of corrugated-core sandwich plates using a FSDT and a meshfree Galerkin method.

A meshfree Galerkin method is proposed for the buckling analysis of corrugated-core sandwich plates (CSP). A CSP is a composite structure composed of three parts — one corrugated sheet in the middle of the structure which can be approximated by an orthotropic plate that has different elastic properties along the two perpendicular directions. The displacement fields of the component are given with the moving-least squares (MLS) approximation and the first-order shear deformation theory (FSDT). The equations governing the elastic buckling behaviors of the three components are derived and superposed to present the meshfree governing equation of the entire CSP. A technique that was originally used to enforce essential boundary conditions in meshfree methods is developed to treat the governing equations before the superposition according to the displacement compatibility. The program is compiled on the C++ platform, and several numerical examples are employed to demonstrate the convergence and accuracy of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method has high accuracy for the stability analysis of CSP under certain conditions. • A meshfree model for buckling analysis of CSP is proposed. • The corrugated core is approximated by an orthotropic plate. • The proposed method can be applied to buckling analysis of CSP, where the length to width ratio and span to height ratio in certain ranges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]