In the paper, the problem of the interaction between thin-walled beams with sandwich panels has been presented. The sandwich panels consist of steel external facings and the polyurethane foam core. The Z and C cross-section shapes and their various mutual orien tations have been considered. The stabilization effect provided by the sandwich panels was investigated in a full-scale laboratory experiment and then compared with the numerical model. The full-scale test allowed for validation of the

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... merical model created in the Abaqus/CEA environment. The Newton-Raphson procedure with geometrical and material nonlinearity was implemented in order to perform the numerical computations.