Dynamic thermomechanical analysis on composite sandwich plates with damage

Abstract

The dynamic thermomechanical analysis on composite sandwich plates with damage is investigated in this paper. A thermomechanical extended layerwise/soild-element (TELW/SE) method is developed for sandwich plates. In the TELW/SE method, the thermomechanical extended layerwise theory is used to model the behavior of the laminated composite facesheets, while the thermomechanical eight-node solid element is employed to discretize the cores. The total governing equations are assembled by using the interface conditions, to ensure the compatibility of displacements and temperature, and the equilibrium of internal force. In the numerical examples, the dynamic thermomechanical analysis is carried out for the sandwich plates with one or two layer honeycombs cores, taking the delaminations, transverse crack and debonding at core/facesheets interface into account. The proposed method is validated by using three-dimensional elastic models developed in commercial finite element softwares Comsol and Abaqus, and good agreement is achieved. Several typical damage in composite sandwich plates can be described finely in the proposed method.