Stiffness of the sandwich panel with free edge as a constructional part of a spacecraft

The article considers the problem of critical pressure load determination for rectangular sandwich plate with one free edge, two opposite gimbal-mounted edges and one cantilever edge. Gimbal-mounted edges of the plate are under linearly varying load. This problem is not analytically solved yet. In this work the variation equations of plate stability were solved via Kantorovich method and via generalized Galerkin method, with special beam functions as basic functions. The analytical formula for critical pressure load is obtained. Calculations of critical loads for several variants of plates were done using this formula and the results were verified via finite-element package. The verification shows that the analytical formula could be successfully used in engineering and design calculations with minimal computational cost and high accuracy.