Bending of Tapered Anisotropic Sandwich Plates with Arbitrary Edge Conditions

Abstract

The bending of tapered sandwich plates is analyzed by a new formulation. The tapered sandwich plate consists of an orthotropic core with linear thickness variation and two anisotropic laminated faces with constant thickness. The faces are analyzed by the classical lamination theory. The analysis shows the geometric coupling between the core shear strain and the face normal deflection in the explicit expression existing only for the tapered geometry. The total potential energy is obtained and the Rayleigh-Ritz method is employed for an approximate solution. Present formulation can be applied to arbitrary edge conditions. The structural deflections are calculated for various edge conditions, taper ratios, core moduli ratios, and stacking sequences. The numerical results show that, as the taper ratio increases, the deflection increases up to certain taper ratio and then decreases by the contribution ratio change of each component.