The spherical sandwich shell under axisymmetric static and dynamic loading

Abstract

A formulation and formal solution is presented for the dynamic response of a spherical sandwich shell under axisymmetric but otherwise arbitrarily distributed, time-dependent surface tractions, for arbitrary initial conditions and (admissible) homogeneous boundary conditions. The sandwich shell is composed of a core and two laminated covering facings. The core deforms in shear and bending. The thin facings deform by membrane action only. The solution is obtained in terms of the eigenfunctions associated with the free vibration of the shell, and appropriate orthogonality and normalization relations are formulated. The specific case of the free-vibration problem of a hemispherical sandwich shell is solved, and an example of shell response to a transient loading condition is presented. The corresponding static solution is also given in terms of an eigenfunction expansion.