Nonlinear Dynamic Buckling of Sandwich Panels

Nonlinear dynamic buckling of simply supported rectangular sandwich panels with isotropic cores and with initial curvature under transverse loads is analyzed. The large deflection sandwich panel equations proposed by Reissner are solved using a trigonometric series spacewise and by Houbolt scheme for timewise integration. The resulting nonlinear algebraic equations are solved by Newton’s iterative method to yield the deflection coefficients at all time intervals. The present investigation essentially deals with the influence of dynamic loads on the snap-through behavior of sandwich panels. The effect of the initial curvature and core modulus is studied in detail. Static snap-through collapse loads are also calculated and compared with dynamic loads. As a check for the present analysis the results obtained for the static case for a homogeneous plate are compared with the available results. It has been shown that for a given sandwich panel with a given initial curvature, the dynamic snap-through loads can be estimated directly from the static snap-through loads without actually resorting to dynamic analysis.