Equivalent orthotropic plate model for fibre reinforced plastic sandwich bridge deck panels with various core configurations

Abstract

Fibre reinforced plastic sandwich panels with various core shapes are an attractive solution for using as bridge deck panels. This type of profiles provide very high stiffness-to-mass ratio along with numerous impressive properties like corrosion resistance, non-magnetic, high impact strength, high dielectric strength etc. The analysis of sandwich panels using exact three dimensional modelling is very complicated and also time consuming. To overcome this problem, the whole deck panel can be assumed as an equivalent orthotropic continuum for simplified analysis. Using the present formulation a FRP sandwich panel can be modeled as a simplified single layered orthotropic plate. In this study equivalent elastic constants of fibre reinforced plastic sandwich bridge deck panel has been calculated numerically using finite element based software ANSYS. The present numerical method is applicable for finding equivalent orthotropic property of any core shape with periodic nature. The results generated from the present method are validated by comparing with the reported theoretical and numerical results.