Energy absorption behavior of a cladding sandwich panel with axially oriented aluminum foam filled tubular cores under impact

Abstract

This paper introduces a new sacrificial cladding, comprising multiple aluminum foam filled tubular cores sandwiched between two steel plates for resisting impact load. In this study, the deformation modes, displacement responses, impact force, and energy absorption of the proposed sandwich panel under both low-velocity and high-velocity impacts were analyzed via numerical simulations. It was found that the impact process was dissected into three stages. The investigation highlighted tubular cores as a primary energy absorber accounting for approximately 2/3rd of the total energy absorption as compared to aluminum foam and flat steel plates. Moreover, the effect of hammer position, tubular core orientation and hammer shape was studied through numerical parametric studies. Further analysis of a counterpart panel with horizontally oriented tubular cores showed that the axially oriented tubular cores exhibit enhanced energy absorption performance as compared to horizontally oriented tubular core panels performing approximately 2 times better in low velocity impact scenarios and about 1.85 times better in high velocity impact scenarios. The effects of impactor position and impactor shape were studied. The result indicated that the significant deformation occurred near the point of impact. Also, the data revealed that when the proposed sandwich panel was impacted with cylindrical impactor, resulting in higher energy absorption values compared to hemispherical impactor in both low-velocity and high-velocity scenarios.