ABSTRACT
The analysis of conventional sandwich plates with two stiff layers separated by a weak core has been the topic of extensive investigation, and several reference books have been written on the subject. For analyses of simply supported rectangular plates, they also demonstrated that the computational efforts could be significantly reduced if the finite layer model was used. Having the stiffness matrices of the strips and prisms formed in terms of the nodal parameters, the combined stiffness matrix for the sandwich system can be obtained by enforcing the displacement continuity conditions along the interface between the core and facing. The finite layer model can also be applied to the analysis of sandwich plates which are comprised of layers of uniform thickness. The characteristic matrices of each layer can be formed by substituting the material constants into the appropriate equations.
