Contribution to Shear Wrinkling of GFRP Webs in Cell-Core Sandwiches
Publication: Journal of Composites for Construction
Volume 15, Issue 5
Abstract
Glass-fiber-reinforced polymer (GFRP) cell-core sandwiches are composed of outer GFRP face sheets, a foam core, and a grid of GFRP webs integrated into the core to reinforce the shear load capacity. One of the critical failure modes of cell-core sandwich structures is shear wrinkling, a local buckling failure in the sandwich webs because of shear loading. The shear wrinkling behavior of GFRP laminates with different laminate sequences, stabilized by a polyurethane foam core, was experimentally and numerically investigated. Shear wrinkling was simulated by a biaxial compression–tension setup. The results show that an increasing transverse tension load significantly decreases the wrinkling load. The decreasing effect of tension is explained by the lateral contraction because of Poisson’s effect, which causes an increase in the initial imperfections and subsequent accelerated bending.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the Swiss Innovation Promotion Agency CTI for its financial support (Grant No. UNSPECIFIED9121.1 PFIW-IW), Scobalit Composites, Winterthur, Switzerland for fabricating the sandwich plates, and the EPFL Laboratory of Applied Mechanics and Reliability (LMAF) for use of the biaxial test machine.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Composites for Construction
Volume 15 • Issue 5 • October 2011
Pages: 833 - 840
Copyright
© 2011 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Sep 17, 2010
Accepted: Feb 9, 2011
Published online: Feb 11, 2011
Published in print: Oct 1, 2011
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