Analytical and numerical analysis on local and global buckling of sandwich panels with strut-based lattice cores

Additive manufacturing (AM) offers new possibilities to fabricate and design lightweight lattice materials. Due to the superior mechanical properties of these lattice structures, they have the potential to replace honeycombs as cores in sandwich panels. In addition to the advantage of the integral fabrication thanks to AM, additively manufactured lattice core sandwich panels may be also used as heat exchangers, enabling a multifunctional use of the core. To ensure a reliable and safe structure, the mechanical response of lattice core sandwich panels under given load conditions must be predictable. In conventional sandwich panels subjected to compressive loads, the sandwich’s global buckling and the face sheets’ local buckling are the dominant failure modes. In constrast, core strut buckling may be the critical failure mode in lattice core sandwich panels. Therefore, an analytical 2D model to predict the local buckling of lattice core struts is considered in this study. Furthermore, the critical load for global buckling is obtained based on the first-order shear deformation theory. Thus, the transition from local buckling to global buckling depending on the length-to-thickness ratio is captured by the presented model. The comparison with finite element modeling of the sandwich model with truss cores has proved the accuracy of the derived model.