Local buckling of delaminated sandwich beams using continuous analysis

The paper presents a method of continuous analysis for predicting the local delamination buckling load of the face sheet of sandwich beams. The discontinuous system of a face sheet delaminated from the elastic core is treated as a continuous system of the face sheet without debond but subjected to an added force system that causes the net interfacial tractions at the separated region to vanish. The effect of transverse normal and shear resistance from the core is accounted for. The procedure allowing direct determination of the buckling load by considering the entire region without separating it into regions with and without delaminations is effective for this class of problems. Fourier series in conjunction with the Stokes transformation is used which provides a unified solution for problems with different end conditions. The concept of analysis can foreseeably be extended to two-dimensional plate problems with delamination regions of arbitrary shapes. Some numerical results am presented to illustrate the applicability of the analysis procedure and effects of various parameters to the buckling load. Copyright 0 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.