A comprehensive analysis of auxetic honeycomb sandwich plates with graphene nanoplatelets reinforcement

Abstract Nowadays, sandwich plates with cellular core structures are gaining the attention of researchers owing to their outstanding features. For a better insight into auxetic structures, in this study, we propose an excellent computational approach based on polygonal meshes to comprehensively examine the free vibration, buckling and dynamic instability behaviors of the auxetic honeycomb sandwich plate structures. A generalized C 0 -type higher-order shear deformation theory ( C 0 -HSDT) in conjunction with both Laplace and quadratic serendipity shape functions is employed to approximate the strain fields for polygonal plate elements. The sandwich plate structures are constituted by an auxetic honeycomb core layer with negative Poisson’s ratio and two skin layers reinforced by graphene nanoplatelets (GNPs). Ultra-light features of the plate structures can be obtained by using the auxetic honeycomb cells with negative Poisson’s ratio while the GNPs are embedded into skin layers to enhance the structural stiffness. In order to determine the dynamic instability region of the sandwich plate, Bolotin’s approach is utilized in the current research. Several numerical examples are carried out to investigate the influences of geometrical parameters of auxetic cell and GNPs reinforcement on the structural behaviors. The results obtained in the current research can be considered as benchmark ones to investigate auxetic sandwich plate structures.