High Order Analysis of Junction Between Straight and Curved Sandwich Panels

Abstract

When curved and straight sandwich panels are joined, localized bending effects arise in the vicinity of the curvature discontinuity. To investigate this the problem is analyzed using a high order sandwich beam theory. This, however, is not straight forward because the continuity conditions at a junction cannot be fulfilled in an exact sense. Instead an averaging scheme is suggested and used to obtain a set of approximate continuity conditions. The accuracy of these approximate continuity conditions is estimated and a numerical example is conducted and compared with finite element analyses. The results prove to be within the estimates of the inaccuracy. A parametric study is conducted to identify possible ways to reduce the localized bending effects.