Free Vibration and Buckling Analysis of Sandwich Plate

Abstract

The present study deals with the free vibration analysis of a three layered sandwich plate. It consists of a damping layer which is viscoelastic in nature being sandwiched or glued in between two elastic face plates; one being the basic plate at the bottom and another one is the constraining layer at the top. The finite element modeling is based on first order shear deformation theory. The mathematical calculation is done by Finite Element Method in which each layer of the plate is discretized into small elements and by using the governing equations of motion, the static and dynamic characteristics of a sandwich plate like its frequency and its buckling load capacity is determined. Here we have a four-noded sandwich plate element which has seven degrees of freedom at each node in order to have same transverse displacement. The equations of motion are determined by Hamilton’s principle. Then the required validation is done by comparing the results of the theoretical method with those obtained from analysis using ANSYS. The analysis is done by using ANSYS (APDL) software and its natural frequencies and their nodal displacements were found out by taking simply supported end condition on all the four sides of a sandwich plate.
For studying the buckling analysis of plates, a uniaxial compressive load was applied on the edge and the effect of various geometric parameters on critical buckling load was determined. The convergence of buckling load with mesh size was studied .The results obtained were same as the reference values with good accuracy.