Analysis of adhesive scarf repairs on composite sandwich beams under three-point bending loading

Abstract

The efficiency of a repair strategy applied to a honeycomb/carbon-epoxy sandwich beam was analyzed in this work. Experimental tests were performed considering three-point bending loading of undamaged, damaged and repaired specimens. In the damaged case, the central part of the core and of one of the skins were removed. The repair scheme consists of bonding a plug of honeycomb into the core and repairing the carbon-epoxy skin considering a scarf patch. A finite element analysis incorporating cohesive zone mixed-mode I + II analysis was performed. The resultant load-displacement numerical curves were compared with the experimental ones. It was verified that the repair procedure is efficient regarding recovery of the initial stiffness and strength of the undamaged case, and it was concluded that the proposed numerical model is a valid tool to deal with repair of sandwich beams.