Wrinkling of Zebra Skin Sandwich Panels

Abstract

The wrinkling, or skin buckling, behavior of sandwich panels with skins consisting of equally spaced strips was investigated. These so-called zebra skin sandwiches proved to be superior to full skin sandwiches in terms of weight and wrinkling strength. Two and three-dimensional finite element analyses were performed and the full skin sandwich results were compared to various results in the open literature. An approximate analytical estimate, using Euler-Bernoulli kinematics in the skin and a simple exponentially decaying field in the core, was derived and compared with finite element results.