Free-Vibration, Damping, and Buckling Performance of Sandwich Beams with Glass Fiber Honeycomb Core and Graphene-Reinforced Composite Face Sheets Based on Higher-Order Theory

The vibration, damping, and buckling behavior of graphene-reinforced sandwich beams are investigated in this work. The honeycomb sandwich beam is composed of graphene-reinforced with glass fiber-reinforced polymer (GFRP) composite skins and a GFRP strip-reinforced honeycomb core. The governing equations are developed by using the finite element formulation along with the higher-order beam theory (HOBT). A significant degree of agreement is found when comparing numerical results to accessible literature. Additionally, this work examines the effects of graphene reinforcement, GFRP honeycomb core thickness, graphene-reinforced GFRP skin layer thickness, and end conditions on the vibration, damping, and buckling behavior of honeycomb sandwich beams. The sandwich beam with graphene-reinforced skins outperforms the neat sandwich beam in terms of natural frequency, damping, and buckling, with improvements of 8.04%, 10.56%, and 18.29%, respectively. The lightweight GFRP honeycomb core, combined with the advanced graphene-reinforced composite face sheets, offers interesting applications and further research.