Buckling in thin walled micro and meso structures of lightweight materials and material compounds

Modern materials and material compounds for application in lightweight structures exhibit, in addition to the use of constituents of high specific stiffness and strength, very special micro- and meso-structures. Typical representatives of such material compounds are sandwiches with thin homogeneous or composite face layers and structured core materials (for instance honeycombs and closed or open cell foams). The load carrying capacity of lightweight structures made of such materials and material compounds, respectively, is limited by a considerable number of rather different but interconnected instability modes occurring at length scales which are several orders of magnitude smaller than the size of the structural part. These non-global instabilities are the subject of the presented key-note paper.