Equivalent Analysis of Honeycomb Sandwich Plates for Satellite Structure

The honeycomb sandwich panels have been widely used in the satellite structures, and the equivalent elastic constants for the sandwich panels directly influence the accuracy of computational results. Three equivalent methods based on sandwich plate theory, honeycomb plate and equivalent plate theory were derived and analyzed by numerical comparisons. Only the core is equivalent when using the sandwith plate theory while the whole honeycomb sandwich panel is equivalent when using the honeycomb plate and equivalent plate theory. By using the above three equivalent methods the natural frequencies of a honeycomb sandwich panel including two load cases were calculated. The computational results show that all of the three equivalent methods discussed in this paper are reliable and practical in the finite element analysis of satellite structures.