Simplified Vibration Analysis of Elastic Sandwich Plates

In a sequence of three recent papers a new flexural theory of elastic sandwich plates has been developed, 2 and, on the basis of the theory, the flexural vibration of sandwich plates has been analyzed. The theory is good for a very wide frequency range that is of practical interest, but vibration analysis on the basis of the theory will in general be complicated due to the high order of the equations. For low frequency ranges and for ordinary sandwich plates that have very thin face layers simplified treatment of the vibration problem becomes possible and is discussed in this paper. Simpler equations of motion of sandwich plates are introduced, and their accuracy is determined by comparing with the previous more complete equations.