Wrinkling of sandwich panels for marine applications

Sammanfattning: The recent development in the marine industry with largerships built in sandwich construction and also the use of moreadvanced materials has enforced improvements of design criteriaregarding wrinkling. The commonly used Hoff?s formula isnot suited for the highly anisotropic fibre reinforced sandwichface sheets of today.The work presented herein investigates the wrinklingphenomenon. A solution to wrinkling of anisotropic sandwichplates subjected to multi-axial loading is presented. Thesolution includes the possibility of skew wrinkling where thewrinkling waves are not perpendicular to the principal loaddirection. The wrinkling angle is obtained from the solutiontogether with the maximum wrinkling load. This method has beensupported with tests of anisotropic plates subjected touni-axial and bi-axial loading.The effect of the face sheet local bending stiffness showsthe importance of including the face sheet stacking sequence inthe wrinkling analysis. The work points out the influence ofthe face sheet local bending stiffness on wrinkling. Threedifferent means of improving the wrinkling load except changingcore material is evaluated. The effect of the differentapproaches is evaluated theoretically and also throughcomparative testing. The transition between wrinkling and pureface sheet compression failure is investigated. Theoreticaldiscussions are compared with compressive test results of twodifferent face sheet types on seven different core densities.The failure modes are investigated using fractography. Theresults clearly show how the actual sandwich compressionfailure mode is influenced by the choice of core material,changing from wrinkling failure to face sheet micro bucklingfailure as the modulus density increases.Finally, a new approach is presented where the wrinklingproblem is transferred from a pure stability problem to amaterial strength criterion. The developed theory providesmeans on how to decide which sandwich constituent will failfirst and at which load it will fail. The method give insightto and develop the overall understanding of the wrinklingphenomenon. A very good correlation is found when the developedtheory is compared with both finite element calculations and toexperimental tests.Keywords:wrinkling, local buckling, imperfection,stability, anisotropy, sandwich