Effect of Soft Honeycomb Core on Flexural Vibration of Sandwich Panel

Abstract

As honeycomb core materials have much lower transverse shear modulus than facesheet and are much thicker than the facesheets, the transverse shear deformation plays a significant role on the vibration of sandwich panels. In this paper, the vibration of a sandwich panel with two identical isotropic facesheets and a core of hexagonal cells are studied by applying a variational principle. A simplified model is used to describe the properties of hexagonal honeycomb core. Both low order and high order shear deformation models are employed for shear deformation of the facesheets and core. An analytical solution in Navier form for natural frequency of simply supported rectangular sandwich panel was obtained and the rotational effect was taken into account.