Free-Vibration Analysis of Sandwich Panels with Randomly Irregular Honeycomb Core

An analytical framework has been proposed to analyze the effect of random structural irregularity in honeycomb core for natural frequencies of sandwich panels. Closed-form formulas have been developed for the out-of-plane shear moduli of spatially irregular honeycombs following minimum potential energy theorem and minimum complementary energy theorem. Subsequently an analytical approach has been presented for free-vibration analysis of honeycomb core sandwich panels to quantify the effect of such irregularity following a probabilistic paradigm. Representative results have been furnished for natural frequencies corresponding to low vibration modes of a sandwich panel with high length-to-width ratio. The results suggest that spatially random irregularities in honeycomb core have considerable effect on the natural frequencies of sandwich panels. (C) 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.