Overall behaviour of singly curved shallow sandwich panels: the case of general boundary conditions

The overall behaviour of the shallow sandwich panel with an arbitrary initial profile and general boundary conditions under an arbitrary load is discussed. The structural parameters of the panel that allow one to generalize description of the overall behaviour of the panel are introduced. The mathematical model based on the Reissner-Mindlin plate theory is developed, and the set of governing equations is derived. The implicit nonlinear and explicit linear solutions are obtained for the uniformly loaded panel with uniform curvature and similar boundary restraints. An analysis of the global stability is performed for panels that have general configurations. Three stability modes, namely stable deformation, symmetric and asymmetric snap-throughs are found possible. The influence of the structural parameters of the; panel on its global behaviour is studied. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.