A vibration-based identification of elastic properties of stitched sandwich panels

Stitched sandwich becomes popular in structural application owing to its better performance in the transverse direction with respect to classical sandwich structure and relatively low-cost additional stitching process. The identification of its elastic properties is essential for offering a tailored structure for specific applications. A non-destructive identification method based on vibration test is proposed to obtain these parameters. The number of parameters is firstly reduced by a sensibility analysis. The retained parameters are identified by minimizing the cost function which indicates the gap between measured frequencies from vibration test and calculated frequencies from a finite element model. This method is applied to a stitched sandwich panel and its elastic properties are successfully identified.