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The paper concerns sandwich panels that are commonly used in civil engineering as an building envelope. The facings of the panels are made of zinc-coated steel, while the shear deformable core is made of mineral wool. Mineral wool has a very complex structure. This is an anisotropic material, but it can be assumed that it is orthotropic. Unfortunately, even at low loads mineral wool exhibits physical nonlinearity. The biggest challenge, however, is the structure of the sandwich panel. The core made of mineral wool consists of so-called lamellas, which are much smaller than the whole panel. The lamellas are arranged with a certain offset between each other, but they are not connected in any way. Therefore, interactions between lamellas should be modeled as unilateral constraints. The presented paper presents a proposal for a sandwich panel model with a discontinuous core. Basic failure mechanisms, conditions of their initiation and propagation will be described. An attempt will also be made to compare panels with different lamellas arrangement. Solving the problem of optimal composition of lamellas is one of the current industrial challenges.