Ocean Engineering 63 (2013) 4451

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Ocean Engineering
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/oceaneng

Finite element modeling strategies for sandwich composite laminates under

compressive loading
Marco Gaiotti, Cesare M. Rizzo n
Universita degli Studi di Genova, Scuola Politecnica DITEN, Marine Structures Testing Lab, Via Montallegro 1, I-16145 Genova, Italy

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history:
Received 12 June 2012
Accepted 26 January 2013
Available online 5 March 2013

This paper deals with the buckling behavior of composite sandwich columns under compressive
loading. Namely, nite element (FE) modeling strategies are discussed with the aim to test a suitable
and cost effective solution for assessing the buckling behavior of delaminated sandwich laminates.
Indeed, pleasure craft industry is now facing the challenge of thinner and thinner skin laminates.
Buckling, that in past years was not a governing limit state because of rather high thicknesses and of
limited spans of structural elements, should be now assessed possibly accounting for actual defects, i.e.
delaminations, and applying straightforward but cost-effective approaches, easy to implement in the
everyday practice of composite hull structural design.
A suitable test case, available in open literature, was selected and results of the proposed modeling
strategy are compared with experimental ones as well as with other numerical estimates, showing its
capabilities and addressing hints for FE application.
& 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords:
Composites
Sandwich
Buckling
FEM modeling
Delamination

1. Introduction
Structural behavior of composites under compressive loading
is a complex and interesting topic, gaining more and more
importance in structural design of crafts hull, naval ships components, marine structures and composite laminates in general.
Higher ber contents are nowadays allowed by innovative
fabrication processes, only recently introduced by the marine
industry like e.g. the vacuum infusion. Therefore it is now possible
to fabricate thinner and thinner laminates having sufcient strength
for the intended structural application. In the case of sandwich
structures, thickness of skins is even thinner than in single skin
laminates.
Accounting for the above, buckling behavior under compressive
loading, that was not a governing limit state in past years, should
be nowadays assessed in several structures as well as in marine
and pleasure crafts ones. Sandwich laminates are generally applied
in composite made hulls to keep the stiffening to a minimum by
eliminating the ordinary stiffeners while keeping primary supporting members only. As a result, rather large sandwich panels having
relatively thin skins but thick core are more and more used in
recent designs.

Corresponding author. Tel.: 39 010 3532272; fax: 39 010 353 2127.

E-mail addresses: marcogaiotti@hotmail.com (M. Gaiotti),
cesare.rizzo@unige.it (C.M. Rizzo).
0029-8018/$ - see front matter & 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.oceaneng.2013.01.031

Previous works have drawn the attention to the fact that marine
environmental loads and ships structural behavior emphasize the
limited inter-laminar shear strength of these materials (Baley et al.,
2003), giving rise to delamination induced failures. Moreover,
delamination is usually the most critical type of damage that
composite and sandwich structures experience under compressive
loads as it is difcult to detect (Abrate, 1991; Pavier and Clarke,
1995).
Particularly, marine sandwich panels are prone to delaminate
in between the skins and the core because of a number of reasons
like e.g. difculties in checking the proper bonding during the
manufacturing process, different adhesion properties of the interfaces to be glued, large differences in stiffness between usual
berglass made skins and rather soft polyvinyl chloride foam
(PVC) core, impact loads damaging the adhesion substrate locally.
While hull scantling is typically obtained according to
prescriptive requirements of classication societies rules, nite
element analysis (FEA) is currently applied in pleasure crafts and
yachts structural design aimed only at solving specic problems
of unusual structural behaviors.
Layered shell elements are widely used to idealize the structural
behavior of composite laminates in FEA. However, sandwich structures are generally simulated applying different strategies depending on the nal goal of the analysis. In earlier times and currently in
case of preliminary design and/or quick estimates, they are analytically modeled applying the well established sandwich theory (see
e.g. Plantema (1966)), i.e. considering separately the bending
strength of the skins and the shear strength of the core. In practice,

M. Gaiotti, C.M. Rizzo / Ocean Engineering 63 (2013) 4451

an equivalent single skin is dened having the same bending

stiffness of the sandwich skins only, while the shear strength of
the core is separately checked, hence neglecting the interactions
between the skins and the core. Traditional layered shell elements,
whose stiffness matrix is based on the classical laminate theory
formulation, are nowadays successfully used for FEA, simulating
the core as one of the laminate layers when the overall laminate
bending behavior is of interest and imperfections like delaminations are not explicitly accounted for.
Laminates as well as sandwiches could be also modeled by
several layers of solid elements when the interactions of laminae
need to be accounted for, resulting in a very high computational
effort even for simple and partial models of the considered
structure. As a matter of facts, several layers of brick elements
have to be superimposed in the thickness direction to fully
capture both the bending and the shear behavior of the laminate.
In principle, at least one layer of brick elements per each laminate
layer is necessary to properly represent the change of material
properties in the laminate thickness and the structural behavior
at layers interfaces (Fig. 1, left).
However, to ease the calculation otherwise too time consuming,
the mechanical properties of the ber reinforced skin laminates are
often averaged through the thickness in order to reduce the
required number of brick elements layers. To simulate the behavior
of a skin laminate, multilayer solid elements (Fig. 1, right) can be
applied, whose stiffness matrix is dened averaging the material
properties of each layer of the stacking sequence according to the
classical laminate theory (Matthews et al., 2000), alternatively to
widely applied layered shell elements.
Notwithstanding the above, the difcult task in modeling
sandwich structural components is still represented by the size
of the brick elements simulating the skins because, when one
dimension of the element is signicantly different from the others,
numerical problems arise in the FEA computation (see Matthews
et al. (2000)). Therefore brick element size needs to be of the order
of magnitude of the skins thickness. However, this also governs
the size of the elements simulating the core of the sandwich
because of the necessary node-to-node coupling between the skins
elements and the core ones. Consequently, several element layers
are necessary in the core to avoid elements having one dimension
too larger than the ones of the coupling faces, i.e. of the order of
magnitude of the skins thickness (ADINA, 2008).

45

In short, there is a mismatch of the suitable element size

necessary to model the skins and the core because the classical
sandwich theory, which is the theoretical basis of the layered shell
elements denition, reduces the essentially three-dimensional
composite to a two-dimensional, deformable reference surface
having appropriate bending and shear stiffness properties. On the
other hand, three-dimensional modeling computation costs cannot
be faced in everyday engineering practice, especially by the
pleasure craft industry (see e.g. Greene (1999)).
Riks and Rankin (2002) acknowledged the above mentioned
problem and proposed a penalty function to analytically simulate
the interaction of skins with the compressible core. In practice an
analytical function is used to simulate the thick core soft behavior
supporting the ber reinforced thin skins, which are separately
modeled in the analysis. Such function is also able to account for
the transversal stiffness effects of the core.
Frostig et al. (2005) also introduced an analytical solution to
account for the phenomena at skin/core interfaces in terms
of the interfacial stress components at the upper and lower core
interfaces.
In both cases, the skin/core coupling is faced by dening a
relatively complex analytical function introducing the core deformation effects in the analysis.
Certainly, complexity in the simulation of the behavior of
sandwich under compressive loading is due to the fact that skins
and core have a different structural behavior and they are
coupled. If delaminations are present, such coupling is additionally not continuous in the whole structure. As a matter of facts,
while the core under compression is in practice a solid structure
which behaves like a brick sustaining the shear strains and
allowing transversal compression of a three dimensional stress
eld, skins behave as plates.
Generally, global and local buckling limit states are dened for
layered composite structures under compressive loading, as
shown in Fig. 2 (Matthews et al., 2000). Global buckling is
identied as the instability of the whole section of the sandwich,
which maintains its shape and shifts globally out of plane due to
in-plane compressive load, while local buckling is considered as
the buckling of a portion of the cross section of the laminate.
Due to the more and more reducing thickness of the skins
allowed by novel manufacturing methods and by improvements
in material properties and knowledge, skins may also be affected

Fig. 1. Comparison of FE modeling of laminates: layers of solid elements (left) vs. multilayer solid elements.

Fig. 2. Local (left) and global (right) buckling modes behavior.

46

M. Gaiotti, C.M. Rizzo / Ocean Engineering 63 (2013) 4451

by local buckling where lack of interfacial adhesion occurs (see

again Fig. 2). Moreover, skins and core are coupled each other in
way of the delaminated area, thus interacting and inuencing the
corresponding limit states.
Typically, in local buckling of sandwich, one or both skins
separate from the remaining part of the sandwich, i.e. the core,
due to a localized delamination. This is independently affected by
the out of plane displacements of the sandwich before the in-plane
load reaches the global critical buckling value. Hence, introducing a
non-linearity that often leads to a signicant decrease of the inplane buckling strength before the structural collapse occurs.
A previous numerical/experimental analysis carried out by the
authors on non-damaged sandwich specimens specically intended
for testing under compressive uni-axial loads (Gaiotti and Rizzo,
2011) led to interesting results when using different element types to
simulate the mentioned different behavior of the soft but thick core
and of the thin but very stiff layers forming the skins of a sandwich.
In particular, the idea was to compute a FEA where the core is
modeled using solid elements having 3 degree of freedom (DoF) per
node coupled to 6 DoF shell elements and simulating the thin skins
connection to the core via rigid links. Skins displacements are only
transferred to the core and the rotational DoF of the elements
representing the skins are left free. The experimental validation
leads to consider the above mentioned modeling strategy as a rather
robust and reliable one, provided that the mesh is not too coarse.
Being the skin/core debonding a very critical aspect for sandwich structures and because it is relatively straightforward to take
into account such a defect in the proposed modeling approach by
just removing the rigid link constraints in the debonded area of a
sandwich, the focus of this paper is on the application of the above
mentioned modeling strategy to a debonded sandwich.

2. Selection and outline of the test case

The aim of this paper is to compare the results obtained from the
proposed modeling strategy, whose example is shown in Fig. 3, with
ones obtained with traditional three-dimensional solid elements
models (Moslemian et al., 2009) and to achieve a validation of the
modeling strategy by an experimental/numerical comparison of the
tests reported by Carlsson and co-workers on debonded sandwich
specimens (Vadakke and Carlsson, 2004; Veedu and Carlsson, 2005).
They carried out numerical analyses as well as experimental
tests of specimens of sandwich columns under compressive
loading. They modeled the sandwich using three-dimensional
brick elements for both the berglass (FGRP) skins and the PVC
core and compared the numerical results to the compressive
collapse tests carried out on a set of sandwich specimens with an
induced skin/core debonding.

Satisfactory results were achieved by them in term of nal

value of the critical buckling strength loads but the effects of local
buckling taking place in the debonded part of the skin was not
visible in the in-plane displacement vs. in-plane load plots commonly used to report such kind of results. A different modeling
strategy may overcome this problem.
In fact, the assumption of neglecting the actual shear stress
distribution in the thickness may lead to overestimate the exural
stiffness due to the relatively larger dimension of the PVC core
with respect to skins. Since brick elements well simulate threedimensional strain elds, they should be used anytime the thick
dimension is not negligible with respect to other dimensions.
On the other hand, when exural stresses lead the problem, a
brick model needs several through-thickness elements to properly
capture bending effects. However, when the structure becomes
very thin, a huge number of elements are needed to achieve a
reliable computation to prevent problems arising because of
elements having relatively high aspect ratios and possibly distorted
elements, eventually resulting in a too high computation cost of
the numerical model.
To overcome this difculty, when thin layers are modeled,
6 DoF per node shell elements are commonly used to perform
quick and reliable calculations accounting for rotational DoF and
bending behavior of the laminate. The deal taking place when
conducting a numerical analysis on a sandwich is that those two
modeling strategies need to coexist in the same analysis: in short,
the different elements on the skin/core interface must somehow
be appropriately coupled.
The background idea used in this paper as well as in previous
ones by the authors (e.g. Gaiotti et al., 2011) studying the local
buckling behavior of delaminated single skin laminates is a rather
simple one: a rigid link set, acting only on the three translational
DoF of the solid elements fully constrains the shells to the bricks.
The shell nodes are thus free to rotate, but this fact does not affect
the nal results if sufciently rened meshes are used.
A benchmark study has been conducted by the authors on the
typical geometry of the experimental tests reported in Vadakke and
Carlsson (2004), as described in the following. It is anticipated here
that, according to a convergence analysis carried out in a previous
work (Gaiotti and Rizzo, 2011), the mesh size to model the skins
should have a ratio e/tE0.05, e being the element size and t the core
thickness. It is noted that the test case shows a very thick core
sandwich specimen and it is therefore a rather challenging geometry.
One problem arising from very thin shell elements is the well
known shear locking: element locking is, as widely discussed in
literature (see e.g. Chapelle and Bathe (2003)), the phenomenon of an
element being much too stiff compared with reality. In essence, the
phenomenon arises because the interpolation functions used to map
strains and stresses in the elements are not able to represent zero (or
very small) shearing or membrane strains. If the element cannot
represent zero shearing strains, but the physical situation corresponds to zero (or very small) shearing strains, then the element
becomes very stiff as its thickness over length ratio decreases.
However, the element used for the analysis of the skins in this
paper is the Mixed Interpolated Tensorial Components shell element (MITC9), available in the ADINA software library, designed to
prevent locking problems that may affect thin elements simulating
the skin laminates. Further details are reported in ADINA (2008).

3. Geometry of the test case and targets

Fig. 3. Particular of the skin/core interface (edge of column) showing the rigid link
constraints; multilayer shell elements lie on the midsurface of the skins and their
nodes are rigidly linked to the brick elements of the core at the abutting surface.

The experimental/numerical comparison was carried out considering thick debonded sandwich specimens under compressive
loads, where a polytetrauoroethylene sheet (PTFE widely known as
TM
Teon ) layer was inserted in the stacking sequence to cause the

M. Gaiotti, C.M. Rizzo / Ocean Engineering 63 (2013) 4451

partial debonding of one skin from the core in a dened area. The
considered specimens geometry is shown in Fig. 4 for the case of
the larger debonded area. As explained in the following, this
geometry was selected between the ones tested by Vadakke and
Carlsson (2004).
Two debonded lengths were in fact considered, namely 25 and
50 mm, being all breadth of the specimen debonded. Here the
tests of specimens having the larger debonded area are considered, taking into account the aims of the study. However, two PVC
cores were tested having different elastic moduli and both cases
were considered in order to assess the effect of the core stiffness
on the numerical simulation.
The nominal mechanical properties of the PVC core as given by
the manufacturer for the tested specimens are shown in Table 1,

Fig. 4. Specimens geometry as reported by Vadakke and Carlsson (2004).

Table 1
Mechanical properties of core, Vadakke and Carlsson (2004).
Core type

Ec (MPa)

Gc (MPa)

tc (mm)

H45
H80

42
80

18
30

50
50

47

where Ec is the Young modulus; Gc is the shear modulus and tc the

core thickness.
The six S2-berglass/vinylester [0/90] layers of the skin laminates were initially considered isotropic by Vadakke and Carlsson
(2004), having elastic modulus EF 20600 MPa and an ultimate
strength of XF 177 MPa. Also, the results of a multilayer shell
model is presented considering berglass orthotropic properties
obtained from the well known mixture rule corrected by the
Halpin Tsai correction for transversal moduli (see Table 2 reporting
stiffness and strength properties in longitudinal and transversal
directions as well as tensile, shear and compressive strength).
The bending stiffness matrix of the shell layered elements
applied in FEA of composite laminates is generally expressed as in
Eq. (1):
!
3
3
n
X
 
hk hk1
Dij
Eij k
1
3
k1
where [Eij]k are the elastic moduli of k-th ply in i and j directions
and hk are the distances from the neutral axis of the k-th ply.
It is worth noting that assigning anisotropic directional properties to the berglass layers, may improve the simulation of the
progressive failure of each individual layer by properly considering
its strength properties.
Results of FEA were given by Carlsson and co-workers in terms
of critical buckling load of the tests compared to results obtained
with non-linear analyses using layered solid elements. Their
numerical results showed that in all cases the specimen attained
a constant load level once the maximum load was reached,
indicating it failed to sustain more load after the debonded face
underwent large deections.
This result clearly indicates that their numerical model is
suddenly affected by a global buckling as soon as local buckling
involves the debonded skin. However, photos of the tests show
the specimens affected by local buckling with large deections
involving the delaminated skin only (see Fig. 5) and nal collapse
of the core of the specimen.

4. The nite element model

Table 2
Mechanical properties of skins, Vadakke and Carlsson (2004).
Stiffness

Strength [MPa]

EL
[MPa]

ET
[MPa]

nLT

nTL

32,800

7700

0.29 0.07 3100

GLT
[MPa]

XL-

XL-

XT-

XT-

Traction

Comp

Traction

Comp

234

 164 50

 62

XLT

80

The experimental tests considered as the test case in the

following is the one with a free span of 50 mm whose debonding
extends along one skin through the whole free span, being
clamped on both edges the remaining part of the specimen
(Fig. 4). The FE model used in the present work was built up in
the ADINA environment and, as anticipated, the debonding area is
modeled by removing the rigid link constrains between the skin
and the core. Fig. 6 shows the FE model and its main features.

Fig. 5. Experimental tests photo from Vadakke and Carlsson (2004), local buckling is evident in the progressive failure of the specimen.

48

M. Gaiotti, C.M. Rizzo / Ocean Engineering 63 (2013) 4451

Fig. 6. FE model of the sandwich specimens with core/skin debonding on one side only, in the debonded area the rigid link are missing (top right) while on the intact side
the skin and the core are rigidly linked (bottom right).

Fig. 7. In-plane displacements vs. in-plane load curves for orthotropic multilayer model and failure ag plot example; the curves are practically coincident in the early
linear stage as the contribution to the global stiffness of the PVC core is very poor. Moreover, agreement is maintained in the local buckling stage as it only depends in
practice on the debonded skin properties.

The core is modeled via three-dimensional brick solid elements,

while the skins by MITC9 layered shell elements. On the skin/core
interfaces, a rigid link set constrains the translational displacements of the different elements. The shell elements are placed on
the midsurface of the skins.
The load is applied to the skins in the form of compressive
imposed displacements, representing the actual conditions of the
experimental tests (displacement controlled test).
A linearized buckling analysis is performed rst to obtain the
buckling shapes to be considered as initial imperfections for the
subsequent non-linear analysis, as usual in such kind of calculations. Maximum out of plane displacement amplitude is set to
0.1 mm to generate the initial input shape for the non-linear
analysis.
A non-linear implicit analysis is carried out applying an increasing
in-plane displacement on the berglass skins of the loaded edge: a
maximum 1.0 mm compressive displacement is applied in 100
identical load steps. The stiffness matrix of the FE model is updated
at each equilibrium iteration of each single load step.

The rst mode shape is considered a local mode, as the

eigenvector magnitude is much greater in the thinner debonded area rather than in the remaining part of the specimen
and namely on the intact interface. In fact, the maximum out of
plane displacement of the debonded skin is orders of magnitude
larger than the one of the intact skin, though the latter is small
but non-zero, see Fig. 8. This allows the global mode transition
while increasing the load factor.
Two material models were dened in the calculations for the
skins, also implementing different failure criteria:

 the former considers an elastic orthotropic material model and

uses the Tsai-Wu failure criterion; the failure ag is shown for
each layer of the shell elements representing the skins but it is
not suitable for progressive failure analysis, as the non-linear
algorithm cannot account for failures of individual layers of
shell elements representing the skins, whose stiffness matrix
is dened as per Eq. (1);

M. Gaiotti, C.M. Rizzo / Ocean Engineering 63 (2013) 4451

 the latter assumes an isotropic material but a maximum

allowable in-plane stress of XF 177 MPa is dened; hereafter
the stresses remain constant until strain reaches 2.5% (allowable resin compressive strain) when the element is eventually
totally failed and removed from the computation.
Besides the traditional stressstrain analysis, a load vs. inplane displacements plot can be drawn out aiming at identifying
the buckling behavior of the specimen. In fact, elastic instability
introduces a geometrical non-linearity in the problem, whose
effect depends on the buckling mode (global/local) and on the
specimen geometry (free span and thickness).

5. Results and comparisons

When considering the orthotropic multilayer model, the
numerical analysis predicts an expected result: local buckling is
reached at an early stage, involving the delaminated skin only,
followed by a substantially linear in-plane displacements vs. inplane load relationship having lower slope, until global buckling
involving both skins is attained. See Fig. 7.

Fig. 8. Global buckling affecting the whole sandwich column (displacements

magnied x10).

49

The local buckling load is extracted taking into account the

rst slope change in Fig. 7: the former weak non-linearity
introduced along with the numerical FE model shape (Fig. 7right) clearly indicates a local mode. The global buckling is then
observed in the model when both skins undergo out of plane
displacements (see Fig. 8).
It is worth noting that a widespread failure involves both skins
soon after local buckling is reached, therefore the specimen will
collapse much before global buckling occurs.
Unfortunately, the FE modeling cannot account for nonlinearities in the material properties if multilayer shell elements
are used because of the implicit formulation of the stiffness
matrix of the element.
As briey mentioned, an approximated modeling is attempted
to account for the progressive failure and to calculate the maximum in-plane load strength of the specimen. The material of the
skins is assumed isotropic and equivalent values of mechanical
properties are evaluated in order to obtain the same global
exural stiffness as the orthotropic model. According to the well
established classical laminate theory and considering the multidirectional layers constituting the skins, the average elastic
modulus is E 206 GPa and the Poisson coefcient is n 0.29.
An isotropic Tsai-Hill failure criteria is then considered having
maximum allowable stress XF 177 MPa. As a consequence the
shear limit would result in tmax 177/O3 102 MPa.
When the Tsai-Hill index detects a failure, the stress in the
element will remain constant while increasing the external load,
until the failure strain of the matrix material is reached (2.5%).
This modeling strategy aims to simulate the progressive failure
occurring in the post rst ply failure phase. The simplication lies
in the fact that berglass skin is modeled as a single isotropic
layer and failure is detected only globally.
Example of in-plane displacements vs. in-plane load curves
from this model are plotted in Fig. 9.
The numerical results obtained by the different adopted
modeling strategies are then plotted in Fig. 10 and compared to
results reported by Veedu and Carlsson (2005).
Before proceeding to the discussion of the obtained results, it
is very important to underline that in this case a buckling

Fig. 9. In-plane displacements vs. in-plane load curves for isotropic single layered model accounting for progressive failure.

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M. Gaiotti, C.M. Rizzo / Ocean Engineering 63 (2013) 4451

Fig. 10. Comparison of the different FE models (top plot refers to H45 core, lower plot H80 core), the experimental threshold is shown.

problem, which traditionally only involves the elastic material

properties of the specimen, comes together with localized berglass failure as the phenomena occurs at the same time.
The berglass failure criteria is thus a key factor as it governs
the post-buckling phase together with the geometric elastic
properties and strength of the involved materials.

6. Discussion
Fig. 10 shows the numerical models results of the present
work compared to the original numerical work conducted by
Carlsson and co-workers (Veedu and Carlsson, 2005; Moslemian

et al., 2009). Two plots separately consider the different core

types (H80 and H45).
The following considerations arise from the comparison
reported in the plots:
 All the numerical models show a rather similar nal failure
load, depending on global buckling only, thus neglecting the
material failure criteria;
 For three-dimensional solid element model, failure is a consequence of local buckling in both the modeling approaches
presented in Veedu and Carlsson (2005) and Moslemian et al.
(2009), as deection introduces bending of the specimen, which in
turn increases the stress level;

M. Gaiotti, C.M. Rizzo / Ocean Engineering 63 (2013) 4451

 The isotropic model accounts for a non-linear progressive

failure showing explicitly the ultimate load of the specimen.
Indeed, the maximum in-plane displacement differs signicantly among the analyzed models, depending on the core
properties;
 Global buckling is only reached in the three-dimensional solid
element model (Moslemian et al., 2009) while failure occurs
soon after local buckling in the shell solid models presented
in this paper;
 As far as the problem remains linear, no differences are
observed among different modeling strategies.
The papers about experimental tests conducted by Carlsson
and co-workers unfortunately only report the strength of the
specimens in terms of compressive loads: from this point of view
the model proposed in this paper does show no improvement of
results as the solid element already matched quite well with the
experimental tests. However, the computation costs are signicantly lower, since the total number of DoF of the model is halved
as a result of the mesh size allowed by the use of shell elements
for the skins.
Though, when looking at the images taken during the experimental tests (Fig. 5), local buckling seems to be the leading factor,
dominating the progressive failure of the sandwich. From photos
of the tests a lateral displacement of the order of magnitude of
about 10 mm is argued.
The proposed model, combining three-dimensional solid elements with layered shell elements properly dened to avoid
shear locking effects, i.e. MITC elements, and having translational
DoF coupled via rigid links captures efciently and successfully
the local buckling; thus allowing the calculation of bending
induced stresses. The present case investigated a very local effect
such as local buckling induced by localized debonding: for this
reason a column model has been taken into account. A more
realistic rectangular debonding, not extending from side to side in
width, could be a possible development of the present work. Such
imperfection, intended as delamination in a single skin laminate,
has already been examined by the authors in previous works, and
the proposed numerical model validated by experimental results
(Gaiotti and Rizzo, 2011). The authors are thus condent of a
possible extension of the model presented in this paper to a more
realistic 2-D stress state application also in the case of sandwich
panels.

7. Conclusions
This paper analyzed experimental data of collapse testing of
sandwich specimens under compressive loading with the aim of
testing a nite element modeling strategy, which is able to
account for the different behaviors of skins and core. Namely,
MITC shell elements were used to simulate the skins while three
dimensional solid elements represent the core.
The coupling between the different elements leaves free the
rotational DoF of the layered shell elements. However, this seems
not impairing the effectiveness of the FEA in capturing the
buckling as well as the post-buckling behavior of laminates,
provided that the mesh is not too coarse.
For the analyzed test case, an appropriate mesh size was
determined by a sensitivity study as 5% of the core thickness,
which is rather thick in the selected test case, conrming also
previous results of the authors. Indeed, the renement is quite

51

signicant but reasonable for the current computation devices

and in any case computation costs are by far lower than those
required by a FEA using three dimensional solid elements for both
the skins and the core.
One of the main advantages is that delaminations are easily
accounted for by simply removing the coupling between the
elements representing the skins and those representing the core.
Comparisons with experimental data conrm that the proposed modeling strategy is effective. Moreover, more accurate
information on the failure progression can be obtained either
using orthotropic material properties and a simplied isotropic
material models.
Finally, it is worth noting that simulation of sandwich panels
of larger and more geometrically complex structures like e.g. hulls
of pleasure crafts can be easily implemented in FEA to assess the
behavior of a specic area where delaminations may occur. Owing
the relatively simple modeling approach, it is believed that this
modeling strategy can be successfully applied even for the
condition assessment of a composite structure during service to
check whether it should be repaired or it can be left as it is.
Parametric investigations of typical geometries, materials and
stacking sequences are also seen as a possible future development
of the present work.

References
Abrate, S., 1991. Impact on laminated composite materials. Appl. Mech. Rev. 44,
155190.
ADINA, 2008. Theory and modeling guide v. 8.5.3, ADINA R and D, Inc., Watertown,
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