Stability Behavior of Cylindrical and Conical Sandwich Shells with Flexible Core

A higher-order theory for the analysis of cylindrical and conical sandwich shells with flexible core is presented. The formulation is based on a three-layer sandwich model. The governing equations and the boundary conditions of each individual layer are derived according to the principle of minimum total potential energy. With the consideration of the continuity of the displacements and the internal stress fields at the interfaces, the governing partial differential equations for the sandwich shell are achieved. They are reduced into ordinary differential equations using Fourier decomposition and then solved through a numerical integration procedure. The theory is verified by comparison of achieved results to those published in the literature and to finite element computations.