Investigation of free and forced vibration of GFRP corrugated bio-inspired sandwich beam with HSDT: Numerical and experimental study

Sandwich structures benefited many industries, including aviation, automobile, and naval. The core of the sandwich plays a significant role in structural behavior. This work investigates the free and forced vibration behavior of GFRP corrugated bio-inspired sandwich beams with higher-order shear deformation theory (HSDT). Four different GFRP corrugated bioinspired core configurations are designed, fabricated, and tested using an alternative dynamic method to evaluate the complex shear modulus. The elastic properties of the face sheet for the corrugated bioinspired sandwich beam using the impulse excitation method (ASTM E1876). The user-defined MATLAB code is formulated to analyze the free and forced vibration of the corrugated bioinspired sandwich beam. Among various bioinspired composite sandwich beam configurations, CBIM01 produces the highest stiffness, followed by CBIM02, CBIM03, and CBIM04 because of the strain energy distribution. Pattern arrangement and rectangular strip in the bioinspired composite sandwich beam configurations significantly differ in the natural frequencies. Further, a parametric study of the sandwich beam for four different corrugated bioinspired cores and ply configurations is analyzed using HSDT.

Automated summary

This study investigates the vibration behavior of GFRP corrugated bio-inspired sandwich beams using higher-order shear deformation theory (HSDT). The results show that the core configurations and ply arrangements significantly affect the stiffness and natural frequencies of the sandwich beams.