An equivalent material formulation for sinusoidal corrugated cores of structural sandwich panels

Abstract Metal sandwich panels with corrugated cores are an appealing industrial solution as structural components thanks to their high stiffness-to-mass ratio. Nevertheless, using detailed finite element models for numerical computation of their properties leads to large models and long solution time, especially for acoustic simulations. Therefore, reduction of the complex shaped core to an equivalent homogenous material is commonly used. In this paper, an innovative aluminum sandwich panel with sinusoidal corrugated core is investigated. The properties of the equivalent material are determined both analytically and numerically for the chosen Reissner–Mindlin orthotropic representation. The two derived models are compared in a comprehensive parametric study to validate the computationally much cheaper analytical formulation. Moreover, a validation of the equivalent models is done based on the bending stiffness per unit width of the sandwich panel. Finally, the acoustic behavior of the structure is investigated comparing the reduced layered model with the fully detailed 3D model.