Articles techniques et présentations

The study of deformation of an adhesively bonded sandwich structure reduces to solving the biharmonic equation for the Airy Stress subject to mixed boundary conditions. Because of the nature of the boundary conditions, this boundary value problem does not yield to the standard elementary methods and must be attacked by numerical methods. In this paper we will use COMSOL\'s capability in two ways to address this problem in a rectanguler domain. First we formulate this problem in COMSOL\'s Structural Mechanics module. The key issue of interest is understanding the behavior of stress at the bonded interfaces and at the corners of the domain, and in particular if any singularities form at these boundaries. We will compare the results of our two experiments with the results of other numerical methods applied to this problem.