Modelling and Analysis of Skew Hybrid Sandwich Plate

Abstract

Sandwich plates provide a lightweight and stiff construction for structures where weight saving is an important consideration. Skew sandwich plates can be found in structures such as the swept wings of airplanes which can be idealised as oblique plates. This work presents structural dynamic analysis of a skew hybrid sandwich plate. The sandwich plate is made up of four laminate faces and a soft core (90/0/C/0/90), with cantilever boundary conditions. The skew plate is a hybrid composite with piezoelectric bottom and top layers bonded to their elastic substrate. A moderately thick skew sandwich plate is modelled with ANSYS using an eight-node shell element for the cross-ply laminate faces and a 20-node solid for modelling the soft core of the skew plate. The free flexural vibration behaviour of the skew hybrid sandwich plate has been investigated for different skew angles. The results of the investigation will help in acquiring a better insight about the behaviour of laminated sandwich plates with bonded piezoelectric layers. The results presented here were compared with those found in literature. The motive of incorporating piezoelectrics is that the piezoelectric layers may be used as sensors and actuators for shape control and vibration suppression applications in structural members.