The effect of local bending stiffness on the wrinkling of sandwich panels

Abstract

The use of the face sheet elastic modulus versus the face sheet local bending stiffness while designing against wrinkling is discussed in this paper. It shows that there are several ways to improve the critical wrinkling load of a sandwich panel without replacing the core. It is often possible to increase the wrinkling load by as much as 25 per cent without virtually any increase in weight or cost of the sandwich. This is achieved by improving the local bending stiffness of the sandwich face sheet by either optimizing the stacking sequence, lowering the fibre volume fraction or adding some extra layers of a cheap fibre material to the sandwich face, creating a minisandwich within the face sheet. Experiments are performed that clearly show the potential for increasing the critical wrinkling load by means of altering the face sheet.

Keywords

wrinkling local buckling stability sandwich

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