Static Analysis of Sandwich Plates using ES-MITC3 Elements based on the Third-order Shear Deformation Layerwise Theory

In this paper, a 3-node triangular plate element is developed for static analysis of sandwich plates. The C⁰-plate element attenuates the shear-locking phenomenon by approximating the transverse shear strains according to the mixed interpolation of tensorial components technique (MITC3). The constant strain fields within each MITC3 plate element are improved by using the edge-based smoothed approach (ES), in which the strain fields are averaged on domains of two adjacent elements. Based on the layerwise theory with the displacement fields for each layer described by the third-order shear deformation theory (TSDT), the formulation of the ES-MITC3 plate element is derived for the static analysis of sandwich plates. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed approach are verified through some benchmark sandwich plates subjected to sinusoidal or uniform distributed loads.