Abstract

In this paper, the transverse loading of sandwich plate is formulated to study the three-dimensional stress field in the sandwich plates for various edge conditions. The formulation is based on the weak formulation approach. A complete three-dimensional displacement field is considered and the weak formulation approach is employed to obtain the governing equations of the plate using the three dimensional equilibrium equations of elasticity. An analytical solution is presented for governing equations when two opposite edges of plate are simply supported. A one-step stress recovery scheme is used to compute the out-of-plane stresses in the sandwich plates. A comparison is made with the predictions of exact elasticity solutions in the open literature and very good agreements are achieved. The distribution of stresses is investigated for various boundary conditions and the log-linear procedure is employed to study the order of stress singularity at free and clamped edge of the plate. It is seen that the present approach accurately predicts the distribution of out-of-plane stresses and local concentration of stresses in the vicinity of free and clamped edges of sandwich structures.