Analysis of effect of variation of Honeycomb core cell size and sandwich panel width on the stiffness of a sandwich structure

Abstract

A sandwich structure consists of three main parts i.e. the facing skins, the core and the adhesive. It acts in a way similar to that of the I- Beam. In this research, a sandwich structure has been designed with a regular hexagon honey-comb core made up of Kevlar® and face sheet of carbon fiber. The design has been modelled and the model has also been validated with the experimental and analytical method. Six different configurations of sandwich structures have been proposed. Out of these six, three configurations have the varying cell size i.e. 3.2 mm, 4 mm and 4.8 mm and the other three configurations have the varying panel width i.e. 40 mm, 45 mm and 50 mm keeping rest of the design parameters unchanged. Using ANSYS, analysis has been performed for all these six configurations and equivalent stiffness has been calculated. It has been observed that the honeycomb core cell size does not have a significant effect on the stiffness properties of a composite sandwich panel. The analysis also reveals that with the increased panel width the stiffness of composite panel increases significantly.