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Abstract
This paper conducted experimental and numerical analysis of the nonlinear flexural behaviour of lattice‐web reinforced foam core composite sandwich panels. Composite sandwich panels composed of a polyurethane (PU) foam core with glass fibre‐reinforced polymer (GFRP) composites as the face sheets and lattice webs were fabricated through the vacuum infusion moulding process (VIMP). The flexural behaviour of these composite sandwich panels were experimentally investigated under both uniformly distributed and concentrated loading scenarios. The results showed that reinforced lattice webs can significantly increase the flexural stiffness and load‐carrying capacity of sandwich panels and effectively postpone the onset of interfacial debonding failure between the face sheets and core. The effects of the lattice‐web height and spacing on the ductility and load‐carrying capacities of the sandwich panels were also analysed. Several numerical simulations on lattice‐web reinforced foam core composite sandwich panels under concentrated loadings were also conducted. The effectiveness of the finite element (FE) model was validated by the experimental work. Parametric studies indicated that thicker face sheets and lattice webs can remarkably increase the load‐carrying capacity. Moreover, the load‐carrying capacity and midspan deflection were hardly affected by the foam density.
Highlights
Composite sandwich structures have been widely employed in aviation, military, transport, and civil applications as a result of their unique characteristics, including their high strength, high stiffness-to-weight ratio, structural designability, and excellent corrosion resistance [1,2,3]
Lowdensity materials such as foam, honeycomb cells, and balsa wood are usually adopted as the core of composite sandwich structures, thereby contributing to a high stiffness along the face sheets to resist loadings. e face sheets are generally made of various fibre reinforced polymer composites
The face sheets provide a major contribution to the bending stiffness, while the core provides a major component of the shear stiffness of a sandwich structure [1]
Summary
Composite sandwich structures have been widely employed in aviation, military, transport, and civil applications as a result of their unique characteristics, including their high strength, high stiffness-to-weight ratio, structural designability, and excellent corrosion resistance [1,2,3]. Advances in Civil Engineering demonstrated that the failure mode was dependent on the beam geometry and the density of the foam core They found that the ultimate bending strength and initial stiffness of the sandwich panels were relatively small because no lattice web or fibre insertions were utilized to improve the core stiffness. To achieve a better mechanical performance than those of one-way lattice-web reinforced structures, two-way lattice-web reinforced composite sandwich structures with lattice-web reinforcements in both the longitudinal direction and the transverse direction were fabricated through the vacuum infusion moulding process (VIMP) technique and studied Such lattice-web reinforced sandwich panels [21, 22] showed a significant increase in the load-carrying capacity under compression and bending due to the improved resistance to interfacial debonding between the face sheets and the core. Parametric studies on the effects of the face-sheet thickness, lattice-web thickness, and foam density were analysed and discussed in this paper
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