On the wrinkling of honeycomb sandwich columns with laminated cross-ply faces

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In the theoretical and experimental work on the buckling of sandwich panels with laminated faces reported in Refs. 1 and 2, panels which had certain coupling terms present in the constitutive equations for the faces were solved in an approximate manner. The previous theoretical solution for angle-ply lay-ups assumed that there were sufficient layers present to treat the faces as orthotropic, with the B_ij coupling terms in the constitutive equations put equal to zero. Further simplifying assumptions were made when comparing theoretical and experimental results in Ref. 2 where tests were carried out on three different types of carbon fibre faces; orthotropic, balanced angle-ply and unbalanced cross-ply. It was only in the first case that an exact theoretical analysis was carried out, and the second case was again treated as an orthotropic panel neglecting coupling between direct and shear deformations and bending and twisting curvatures. The unbalanced cross-ply lay-up, which consisted of two fibre reinforced plastic orthotropic layers, one at 0° to the plate axis and one at 90°, gave rise to large B₁₁ and B₂₂ coupling terms which were taken into account approximately using “reduced stiffness” terms with the orthotropic equations. However, the disparity between theory and experiment was greatest in this case, particularly as far as wrinkling was concerned, where the experimental failure load was 78% higher than the theoretical wrinkling load. This type of cross-ply layup is important since it is used when making carbon fibre sandwich floor panels; it being chosen from the point of view of manufacturing convenience rather than from considerations of strength and stiffness. Furthermore, the bending stresses in the faces, which result from the normal loads, predominate in one direction so that one face is subjected to essentially a uniaxial compressive stress which might cause the faces to wrinkle. In order to study this problem in greater depth, it was decided to carry out further theoretical and experimental work on the simpler problem of the wrinkling of sandwich columns with carbon fibre cross-ply faces.