ABSTRACT
The analysis methods developed herein are applicable to both metallic and composite material construction and account for material orthotropy in both the face and core. Corrugated-core sandwich panel will fail if any of the following five events occur: overstressing of the face, overstressing of the core, overall panel instability, local face buckling, or web buckling. Historically, there are four major textbooks dealing primarily with elastic stability or buckling. These are authored by H. H. Bleich, S. Timoshenko and J. Gere, D. O. Brush and B. O. Almroth and G. J. Simitses. In honeycomb core sandwiches, a fourth type of instability occurs because the faces over one cell can buckle as a small plate supported by the cell walls. Methods of analysis developed at the US Forest Products Laboratory used an empirical equation having the form of the plate-buckling equation with the numerical coefficient determined by empirical means.
