Analysis of Sandwich Composite Beams with a New Transverse Shear Stress Continuity Model

This work presents a new composite beam model based on discrete layer theory. It enables the automatic verification of the continuity of transverse shear stresses by taking into account the Heaviside step function. The transverse shear is represented by a sine function which improves the accuracy of the results on the transverse shear stress. The membrane refinement cosine function improves the warping of the straight section in bending deformations. In order to validate the proposed model, several problems in bending and free vibration are presented. For sandwich composite beams, the proposed new model satisfies exactly and automatically the continuity conditions of displacements and stresses at the interfaces, as well as the boundary conditions.