Vibration and stability of sandwich beams with elastic bonding

This paper is a study of the vibration and stability of symmetrical sandwich cantilevers with elastic bonding. The horizontal displacements of the face layer and the core are discontinuous due to the elasticity of the interface bond. The shear traction at the interface is assumed to be proportional to the relative horizontal displacement of the layers. The core layer is subjected to a horizontal (conservative) or tangential (non-conservative) axial force at its free end. It is shown that a symmetrical sandwich beam with elastic bonding has two kinds of vibration modes: i.e., bending modes and longitudinal modes. Numerical results are given for a beam composed of FRP face layers and a syntactic-foam core layer. It is shown that the divergence and the flutter type instability loads, as well as the natural frequency, are affected considerably by the stiffness of the interface bond.