Minimum weight design of foam core sandwich panels for a given strength

Abstract In a sandwich beam made of materials that yield plastically, the main modes of failure are yielding and wrinkling of the face and yielding of the core in shear. The minimum weight design of beam is such that the face and core fail simultaneously; otherwise, one component is overdesigned. In this paper, we find the minimum weight design of a foam core sandwich beam or plate of a given strength by constraining the face and core to fail simultaneously using the failure equations developed in the companion paper. We also make use of property-density relationships for foam cores to include the density of the core as one of the beam design parameters to be found in the optimization analysis. The results give the face and core thicknesses and the core density which minimize the weight of a foam core sandwich beam or plate of a given strength.