A unified approach for the prediction of the effective properties of laminated composite cellular core

Abstract

The performance of cellular core sandwich panels is influenced significantly by the choice of geometric and material parameters of the cellular core and skins. In order to determine the optimal design of sandwich panels, it is important to relate the geometric and material parameters of the cellular core to the resulting performance of the sandwich panel. Theoretical homogenisation models are computationally efficient and plays an important role in the inverse design of sandwich panel. This paper presents a methodology to determine the equivalent homogenised properties for composite cellular core systems. The methodology was developed based on a strain energy-based homogenisation approach. Unlike other existing models, the proposed model in this paper is applicable to different core shapes and different composite wall layer configurations. An existing model was further extended for comparison purposes to determine the equivalent properties of hexagonal composite honeycomb core. Results from both models were compared with finite element (FE) results for hexagonal honeycomb cores, and the predictions from the proposed model are also compared with FE results for different cellular core shapes. A good agreement was found between the predicted and FE results. The proposed model was found to be superior to existing models in its ability to consider different core shapes and composite wall layer configurations.