EDGE VIBRATIONS IN COMPOSITE LAMINATED SANDWICH PLATES BY USING A HIGHER ORDER DISPLACEMENT BASED THEORY

A higher order displacement based formulation has been developed to investigate the plane strain edge vibrations or end modes in composite laminated sandwich plates. The formulation has been applied as an illustration, to the laminated sandwich plates made up of transversely isotropic laminae with the axes of symmetry lying in the plane of the lamina and core in-between. The results for isotropic and orthotropic plates are shown to be in excellent agreement with the published numerical solutions. Also, numerical results are obtained for two more examples consisting of two typical sandwich plates to obtain an insight into the physical behaviour of laminated sandwich plates. The higher order method proposed here is found to give equally accurate results by using only about half the number of degrees of freedom in comparison with the numerical techniques available in the literature.