Exploring equivalent elastic constants of functional prismatic sandwich panel

Under the condition that the strain energy of the periodic representative volume element (RVE) is equivalent to the elastic solid RVE, we improve the method for calculating the equivalent elastic constants by considering the in-plane shear effect of a functional prismatic sandwich panel. The prismatic core is equalized to the anisotropic and homogenous material with the macroscopically equivalent elastic constants that are derived from the relationship between strain and macro-strain of the Timoshenko beam theory. The effectiveness of the method is verified by comparing the structural response and the first five natural frequencies of a square prismatic sandwich panel with those of an equivalent sandwich panel; the verification results, given in Figs. 4, 5 and Table 1, and their analysis show preliminarily that our method that considers the in-plane shear effect can caculate more accurately.