Development of a new finite element for the analysis of sandwich beams with soft core

A new super convergent sandwich beam finite element formulation is presented in this article. This element is a two-nodded, six degrees of freedom (dof) per node (3 dof u0, w, φ for top and bottom face sheets each), which assumes that all the axial and flexural loads are taken by face sheets, while the core takes only the shear loads. The beam element is formulated based on first-order shear deformation theory for the face sheets and the core displacements are assumed to vary linearly across the thickness. A number of numerical experiments involving static, free vibration, and wave propagation analysis examples are solved with an aim to show the super convergent property of the formulated element. The examples presented in this article consider both metallic and composite face sheets. The formulated element is verified in most cases with the results available in the published literature