This work is concerned with various planar deformations of an isotropic sandwich beam, which generally consists of three layers: two stiff skin layers and one soft core layer. When one layer of the sandwich beam is modeled as a beam, the variational-a...
This work is concerned with various planar deformations of an isotropic sandwich beam, which generally consists of three layers: two stiff skin layers and one soft core layer. When one layer of the sandwich beam is modeled as a beam, the variational-asymptotic method is rigorously used to construct a zeroth-order beam model, which is similar to a generalized Timoshenko beam model capable of capturing the transverse shear deformations but still carries out the zeroth-order approximation. To analyze the planar sandwich beam, the sum of the energies of the two skin layers and one core layer is then formulated with different material and geometric properties and represented by a universal beam model in terms of the core-layer kinematics through interface displacement and stress continuity conditions. As a preliminary validation, two extreme examples are presented to demonstrate the capability and accuracy of this present approach.