Local facesheet buckling of a sandwich plate with a graded core

Sandwich panels with a soft core are susceptible to local buckling of faceplate, i.e. the faceplate buckles into the core region when subjected to local edge compression. The vulnerability of the weak core to this localized deformation can be improved by the use of a graded core whose material properties vary along thickness direction. This paper investigates the local buckling behavior of a flat sandwich panel containing a graded core based on the first order shear deformation theory by modeling the loaded faceplate as an elastic plate resting on a Vlasov-type two-parameter elastic foundation. A numerical approach is used to determine the local buckling load of the sandwich panel with different boundary conditions. A detailed parametric study is conducted, where the influences of the volume fraction index, Young's modulus ratio, the core and faceplate thickness ratio, the boundary condition and the panel aspect ratio are evaluated. © 2007 Taylor & Francis Group, London.