Buckling and free vibration analysis of bio-inspired laminated sandwich plates with helicoidal/Bouligand face sheets containing softcore

Helicoidal laminates inspired by mantis shrimp crustacean can sustain higher loads compared to conventional laminated structures. However, there is still a lack of bending studies on the plates inspired by these helicoidal structures. The buckling and free vibration studies have been undertaken in the present work on the laminated composite and sandwich plates inspired by the helicoidal structures of the biological characters. Investigations are carried out using higher-order zigzag theory. For sandwich plates, the top and bottom face sheets are assumed to be made up of helicoidal layup schemes. Different kinds of helicoidal schemes, namely, recursive, exponential, semicircular, Fibonacci, and linear helicoidal are considered during the analysis. The buckling and free vibration behavior of helicoidal-based laminated sandwich plates are compared with the conventional laminated sandwich plates such as uniform distribution and cross-ply configurations. The influence of the number of layers, helicoidal schemes, geometric properties, and end conditions on the buckling and free vibration analysis of bio-inspired helicoidal laminated composite and sandwich plates is carried out in detail.