Effect of temperature and thermal cycles on the mechanical behavior of sandwich structure with entangled metallic wire mesh

Abstract

As a novel rigid–flexible heterogeneous material, the sandwich structure with the entangled metallic wire mesh (EMWM) core has obvious advantages on thermo-mechanical performances due to its all-metallic material and structure. Of particular and complexity is the crosslinked microstructure of EMWM core, leading to ambiguous mechanical behaviors of the sandwich structure under gradient temperature and thermal cycles. In the work, the compressive and shear properties of the sandwich structure in different structure directions of the EMWM core were investigated, as well as the thermal cycling failure. The experimental result reveals that the sandwich structure has an excellent compression performance when the temperature below 750 °C. With the temperature increasing, the shear performance of the sandwich structure exhibits a trend from rise to decline. Furthermore, the shear property of the sandwich structure in the transversal direction is better than that in the longitudinal direction. And, the effect of thermal cycle on the failure behaviors (including, the deformation of face-sheet and the delamination of EMWM core) of the sandwich structure was observed. In the number of thermal cycles ranged of 50–200, there are few declinations of the compression and shear performance of the sandwich structure.