A triangular finite element for sandwich plates accounting for transverse core compressibility

The present study is concerned with a triangular higher-order finite element for sandwich plates with transversely compressible core. The element formulation utilizes a v.~Kármán type multilayer theory, adopting the discrete Kirchhoff approach for the contribution of the face sheets and a simplified three-dimensional formulation for the core. The discretized nonlinear problem is solved by the Newton-Raphson method.