Impact of aperture on dynamic response of sandwich plates with aluminium face-sheets and PMI core based on an alternative finite element formulation and experiments

Apertures generally exist in the sandwich structures attributing to mechanical connection and lightweight, which might induce failure of such structures. Thus, it is required to realize the impact of aperture on mechanical behaviors of sandwich structures. If transverse shear deformations are unable to be described accurately, the reasonable prediction of dynamic behaviors of the form-core sandwich plates with apertures will meet severe challenges due to a large difference of transverse shear modulus at the adjacent layers. Thereby, such issue is less studied by using the efficient models and experimental testing, so an alternative sinusoidal-type finite element formulation is to be proposed to precisely predict dynamic response of the form-core sandwich structures with apertures. The proposed finite element formulation can meet beforehand compatible conditions of transverse shear stresses at the interfaces of adjacent laminates. In order to appraise strictly capability of the proposed model, experimental tests on natural frequencies of three groups of specimens with different apertures have been carried out. Moreover, four specimens in each group are tested to reduce the testing errors, which is less reported in the published literature. In addition, three-dimensional Finite Element Method (3-D FEM) is also selected to account for the good performance of the present model. Finally, the impact of aperture diameter on the natural frequencies of the sandwich structures is both experimentally and numerically investigated, which can serve as a reference for other researchers.