Nonlinear thermo-mechanical behaviour of soft core sandwich panels – Creep effects

Abstract

Sandwich panels can be subjected to significant changes in ambient temperature, which develop and sustain over certain time periods and lead to creep of the core material, and consequently to changes in the internal stresses and deformations with time. This paper deals with this issue with focus on the geometrically nonlinear aspects of structural behaviour. A theoretical model is developed, which combines the concepts of the principle of superposition of viscoelasticity, with the high-order sandwich theory (HSAPT), and the temperature dependency of the viscoelastic material properties. The nonlinear HSAPT formulation accounts for the deformability of the core in shear and through its thickness and it is based on large displacement kinematics of the face sheets. The convolution integral of viscoelasticity is converted into a rheological generalized Maxwell model after the expansion of the relaxation moduli into Prony series with temperature-dependence terms, which enables the solution of the governing equations through an incremental step-by-step time analysis without the need to store the response history. The capabilities of the model are demonstrated through numerical examples. It is shown that the creep of the core material can lead to bifurcation buckling of the sandwich panel under sustained temperatures that are smaller than the critical temperature obtained under an instantaneous increase of temperature.