A global–local theory with stress recovery and a new post-processing technique for stress analysis of asymmetric orthotropic sandwich plates with single/dual cores

While the 3D elasticity and the available local and zigzag theories encounter inaccuracies for very thin plates, results of the global theories become unreliable for thick plates with severe transverse variations in the material properties. In the present research, a quadratic finite element global–local sandwich plate theory with elasticity correction (stress recovery) is proposed for static stress and displacement analysis of sandwich plates with orthotropic face sheets and single or dual cores. Since the transverse shear stresses are derived based on the three-dimensional theory of elasticity, the continuity condition of the transverse shear stresses is satisfied at the interfaces between the layers, a priori. The presented theory not only leads to higher accuracies in comparison to the available high-order zigzag theories in some cases (especially, for soft or dual cores) but also it is computationally more economic. Results show that the results of the available zigzag and global–local theories may encounter inaccuracy problems not only for huge numbers of the sub-layers, but also for small numbers of the orthotropic layers.