Thermal buckling analysis of truss-core sandwich plates

Truss-core sandwich plates have received much attention in virtue of the high values of strength-to-weight and stiffness-to-weight as well as the great ability of impulse-resistance recently. It is necessary to study the stability of sandwich panels under the influence of the thermal load. However, the sandwich plates are such complex three-dimensional (3D) systems that direct analytical solutions do not exist, and the finite element method (FEM) cannot represent the relationship between structural parameters and mechanical properties well. In this paper, an equivalent homogeneous continuous plate is idealized by obtaining the effective bending and transverse shear stiffness based on the characteristics of periodically distributed unit cells. The first order shear deformation theory for plates is used to derive the stability equation. The buckling temperature of a simply supported sandwich plate is given and verified by the FEM. The effect of related parameters on mechanical properties is investigated. The geometric parameters of the unit cell are optimized to attain the maximum buckling temperature. It is shown that the optimized sandwich plate can improve the resistance to thermal buckling significantly.