Optimal design of sandwich beams

Abstract
Minimum weight design of sandwich beams is considered in this paper. A small deflection theory is presented for determining the stresses and deformations in variable thickness elastic sandwich beams that are symmetric about their axes. The face sheets are treated as membranes; the core is assumed to carry only transverse shear. The contribution of the face sheet membrane forces (by virtue of their slopes) to the transverse shear is accounted for in this analysis. A deflection constraint as well as stress constraints are considered. The formulated optimal design problem is solved by the optimization system IDESIGN3 which is based on the Recursive Quadratic Programming Algorithm.