Overall and local buckling of sandwich plates with laminated faces, Part II: Applications

In the companion Part I paper a description has been given of the development of a B-spline finite strip method for predicting the buckling stresses of rectangular sandwich plates which may have fibre-reinforced composite laminated faceplates. Such faceplates may be modelled in the context of classical plate theory or of first-order shear deformation plate theory. Here the use of the developed analysis capability in solving specific buckling problems is described. The convergence characteristics of the finite strip method are demonstrated, with respect to both the number of finite strips and the number of spline sections used. A wide range of applications is considered and this range embraces highly localised buckling, of the wrinkling type, as well as overall buckling. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.