Unequal Faces Effect on Fracture of Composite Sandwich Beam with Flexible Core

Sandwich panel higher order theory (SPHOT) which estimates core compression and face stresses is used to predict damage modes of a sandwich beam with unequal faces. It is shown that sandwich panel classical theory (SPCT) which is based on investigating of behavior of the structure with considering core shear stress in simply supported boundary conditions and neglecting shear modulus of core can not predict the failure load in the case of unequal faces when core yielding is happened. Comparing the results obtained by SPHOT, SPCT and available experimental ones shows that the higher order theory is a suitable approach to predict failure loads in this case for different damage modes.