The stress analysis of sandwich shells faced with composite sheets based on 3D FEM

Sandwich shells faced with fiber reinforced plastic laminated sheets are commonly applied to space structures. To accurately describe the structures’ behavior and connect sandwich shell with 3D brick elements, a kind of 32-node and three-layer shell element with relative degree-of-freedom is presented based on 3D FEM. Also, to eliminate the discontinuity of the interlaminlar stress and satisfy the load boundary conditions, a post-processing method for exactly computing transverse shear and normal stresses in laminated shells of revolution is presented. 3D brick elements combined with 32-node and three-layer shell elements are applied for modeling complex structures such as laminated sheets or sandwich with variable thickness, metallic frames or reinforcements. Three numerical examples indicate that the results obtained by the present method is satisfying.