Evaluation of homogenized effective properties for corrugated composite panels

Corrugated panels are widely used as structural elements in engineering fields because of their high stiffness and light weight. Moreover, corrugated composite laminates have attracted much attention as a candidate for morphing aircraft wing that need to have different behaviors in different directions due to their extremely anisotropic behavior. The simple model is required to investigate the mechanical behavior of these structures in design process. On this demand, the equivalent homogenization method of corrugated panels has been used during last decades. This homogenization model is usually treated a corrugated panel as an orthotropic panel that has different material properties in two perpendicular directions. This paper presents an analytical homogenization model for corrugated composite laminates that can be applied easily to any corrugation geometry. This paper gives explicit expressions to calculate not only the effective extensional and bending stiffness but also the effective transverse shear stiffness for a composite corrugated panel. The effective stiffness of the trapezoidal corrugation shape which is the most common corrugation geometry is evaluated and compared with those of the flat composites. To validate the proposed approach, the obtained results are compared with the previously published results.