Abstract：Sandwich structures, due to their outstanding properties, such as high stiffness and relatively low weight, have found wide applications in aircraft, aerospace, naval/marine, construction, transportation, and wind energy systems. There are a good number of outstanding works studies devoted to the modeling and analysis of sandwich structures. Most of these works studies are based on the First-order Shear Deformation Theory (FSDT), in which the transverse shear stresses are assumed to be uniformly distributed across the thickness of sandwich plate. The FSDT is simple and accurate for thin sandwich plates, but needs a shear correction factor in order to satisfy the zero transverse shear stress boundary conditions at the top and bottom surfaces of the plate. Besides, the errors in deflection and stresses predicted by FSDT are not negligible when the plates are not sufficiently thin enough. Therefore, the Higher-order Shear Deformation Theory (HSDT) was proposed by several researchers to overcome the shortcomings of FSDT. In this paper, a special HSDT model is developed to investigate the bending and vibration behaviors of sandwich plates. In the HSDT model, the in-plane stiffness, bending stiffness, and transverse stiffness are considered in for both the surfaces and the core; the rotational displacement function associated with transverse shear effect is given based on the transverse strain distribution; the governing equations of the sandwich plates are derived by using Hamilton’s variational principle. Parameter studies are conducted to demonstrate the influences of the core elastic modulus and the surface thickness of surfaces on the bending and vibration behaviors of simply supported sandwich plates. The results calculated by using the present model are compared with those given by Reissner, Hoff and Deng. The comparison shows that the present model has a better accuracy and a wider application scope. Also, the modal solutions obtained by from the present model are compared with those obtained by using Nastran software to show the suitable application scope of each model in dealing with the vibration behavior of sandwich plates.
2017, Vol. 38 
