Ultimate strength behavior of laser-welded web-core sandwich plates under in-plane compression

This paper numerically investigates the ultimate strength behavior of the laser-welded web-core sandwich plates under in-plane compression. Both geometric nonlinearity and material nonlinearity are taken into consideration. Besides the global deflection of the sandwich plate, the local deflections of the face plates are also introduced in the ultimate strength analyses to study the influence of the local buckling on the ultimate strength. The influence of the magnitudes of the initial deflections on the ultimate strength of the web-core sandwich plates is studied. Four boundary conditions are considered, and the result shows that the boundary conditions on the unloaded edges, i.e. the simply supported or clamped boundary conditions, have little effect on the ultimate strength of the sandwich plate. The ultimate strength of the sandwich plates shows a reduction when the laser weld rotation stiffness is accounted for, and transverse shear stiffness has a large effect on the ultimate strength. The contact between the web plates and face plates in the joints increases the ultimate strength of the sandwich plates, and the smaller root gap results in the higher ultimate strength.