Face layer wrinkling in sandwich shells— theoretical and experimental investigations

Abstract Wrinkling of the face layers is one of the typical failure modes in sandwich structures. Different aspects of this phenomenon are investigated in this paper: analytical considerations concern the determination of wrinkling loads for anisotropic elastic sandwiches under uniaxial as well as biaxial loading. Finite element calculations are carried out to investigate the postbuckling behaviour of isotropic sandwiches, with different combinations of nonlinear material combinations, under compressive and/or bending loading, and experimental studies are performed to verify the analytical and numerical results, respectively.