Hossein Ravanbakhsh - Mechanical Maintenance Engineer, ۴th Refinery of South Pars Gas Complex

Sandwich panels are extendedly used in construction of work stations in refineries because of energy conservation purposes. Therefore, investigation of sandwich panel failure is an important subject of energy saving. In this paper, sandwich panel higher order theory (SPHOT) is used for three point bending analysis of foam core sandwich plates to predict failure mode map of the structure. Parameters affecting failure map are studied and the influence of material parameters along with contact width were investigated. Considering failure map, the load of failure was also obtained as an envelope and the effect of plate size on the failure force of structure is discussed. Results are verified and compared with finite element solution together with other theories available in the literature. It was shown that change of the core strength may shift the failure map while general shape of the map remains unchanged. On the other hand, contact width has strong influence on the sequences of failure modes. At last, optimum dimensions for designing the best energy saver sandwich panel is obtained.

Sandwich panel; Failure map; Higher order theory; Indentation; Core shear; Face yielding