Vibration characteristics of simply supported pyramidal lattice sandwich plates on elastic foundation: Theory and experiments

In this paper, an effective theoretical method is developed and experimentally validated for investigating the vibration behaviors of the simply supported sandwich plates with a pyramidal truss core on elastic foundation. An adjustable sliding support frame that can adapt to variations in the plate length and width is designed to realize the simply supported boundary conditions. The kinematic relations of the sandwich plates are derived, and the constitutive or stress–strain relationships for the face sheets and pyramidal truss core are established. The governing equations of motion are derived by Hamilton’s principle, and the structural vibration characteristics are conveniently analyzed. The structural natural frequencies calculated from the present theoretical method are compared with the experimental and FEM simulation results, which validates the correctness and accuracy of the present theoretical model. The effects of the geometric parameters, material properties and combinations as well as elastic foundation on the vibration behaviors are analyzed in details. The key contributions of this paper are the establishment of the dynamic model, the design of the adjustable sliding support frame simulating the simply supported boundary conditions and the systematic parametrical analysis of the structural vibration behaviors by the theoretical and experimental methods. • A theoretical method is developed for studying vibration behaviors of pyramidal lattice sandwich plates on elastic foundation. • A sliding support frame is designed to realize the simply supported boundary conditions. • An experimental method is proposed to analyze the vibration characteristics of sandwich plates. • The effects of the structural parameters on the natural frequencies are investigated systematically.