Elastic–plastic buckling behaviour of beetle elytron plate with simple, fixed and flexible core supports

Beetle elytron plate (BEP) is a new type of sandwich structure inspired by the internal architecture of beetle elytra and characterised by trabeculae in the core to achieve higher load bearing capacity compared to the basic conventional honeycomb sandwich plate. This paper investigates elastic–plastic buckling behaviour of the compressive skin of BEP with flexible core. The development is based on adapting existing solutions for relevant structures through the following three transformation steps: (1) obtaining the elastic–plastic buckling stresses of BEP with simple and fixed supports by extending respective solutions for conventional sandwich plate; (2) modifying the elastic buckling stress solution for conventional sandwich plate with flexible core to BEP with flexible core through replacement of deformation shape functions; (3) assuming that the interpolation function between simple and fixed supports for BEP with flexible core for elastic buckling stresses is applicable to elastic–plastic buckling stresses. Despite complexity of the problem and simplification in the above mentioned transformation steps, the proposed analytical method is shown to be quite accurate by comparison against numerical simulation results using a validated ABAQUS model for a variety of BEP geometries (such as trabecular diameter, slenderness values of the compressive skin and the core layer) and different material properties as represented by Ramberg–Osgood model covering the entire spectrum of elastic buckling to plastic behaviour, with the maximum difference between the proposed analytical model and numerical simulation results being 7%.