Bending and Buckling of Circular Sandwich Plates with a Hardened Core

Hard-core sandwich plates are widely used in the field of aviation, aerospace, transportation, and construction thanks to their superior mechanical properties such as sound absorption, heat insulation, shock absorption, and so on. As an important form, the circular sandwich is very common in the field of engineering. Thus, theoretical analysis and numerical simulation of bending and buckling for isotropic circular sandwich plates with a hard core (SP-HC) are conducted in this study. Firstly, the revised Reissner’s theory was used to derive the bending equations of isotropic circular SP-HC for the first time. Then, the analytic solutions to bending deformation for circular and annular sandwich SP-HCs under some loads and boundary conditions were obtained through the decoupled simplification. Secondly, an analytic solution to bending deformation for a simply supported annular SP-HC under uniformly distributed bending moment and shear force along the inner edge was given. Finally, the differential equations of buckling for circular SP-HCs in polar coordinates were derived to obtain the critical loads of overall instability of SP-HC under simply supported and fixed-end supported boundary conditions. Meanwhile, the numerical simulations using Nastran software were conducted to compare with the theoretical analyses using Reissner’s theory and the derived models in this study. The theoretical and numerical results showed that the present formula proposed in this study can be suitable to both SP-HC and SP-SC. The efforts can provide valuable information for safe and stable application of multi-functional composite material of SP-HC.