An Analytical Study of Post-Buckling of Debonded One-Dimensional Sandwich Plates

An analytical method is developed to study the problem of one-dimensional sandwich plates containing debonded face-sheets and subjected to in-plane compressive loads. The non-linear governing equations for the sandwich plate are solved to obtain a relation between the boundary forces and displacements in a matrix form as in the finite element method. The debonded sandwich plate is divided into four elements. The element stiffness matrices are assembled to obtain the global stiffness matrix, and the global equations are solved to obtain the displacements. The results include load/end-shortening relations. The method is found to be very efficient and accurate, and can be used to study the progressive damage of debonded sandwich plates under in-plane compressive loads.