Sandwich panels exhibit various types of failure modes depending on the steel face used. For the flat and lightly profiled sandwich panels, flexural wrinkling is an extremely important design criterion as the behaviour of these panels is governed mainly by flexural wrinkling. However, in the lightly profiled panels, when the depth or spacing of the ribs increases, flat plate buckling between the ribs occurs leading to the failure of the entire panel due to the interaction between local buckling and flexural wrinkling modes. Current design formulae for sandwich panels do not consider such interactive buckling effects. To obtain a safe design solution, this interactive buckling behaviour should be taken into account in the design of lightly profiled sandwich panels. Therefore a research project was undertaken to investigate the interactive buckling behaviour of lightly profiled panels with varying depths and spacings of the ribs using a series of experiments and finite element analyses. A new improved design formula was developed for the safe and economical design of lightly profiled panels that takes into account the interaction between local buckling and flexural wrinkling. This paper presents the details of this investigation, the results and the new design formula.
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