Experimental and numerical analysis of uni-axial buckling of single-phase functionally graded porous polymeric sandwich plates

Abstract

The porosity gradient functionally graded material (PFGM) is one of the most popular types of FGM, in which the porosity in the material is made to change in the specified direction. This study looks into the buckling problems of rectangular sandwich plates made of single-phase porous functionally graded materials (PFGMs), commonly used in aircraft structures and biomedical applications. A compression test was performed on the 3D-printed polymeric FG specimens bonded with two thin solid face sheets on the upper and lower surfaces. The critical stress of well-designed and fabricated 3D printed FGM plate samples with various metal core types is determined using a PC installed on universal testing equipment (UTM). The effect of different essential parameters (such as porous ratio, gradient exponent, and aspect ratio) on buckling load and total deformation were explored.The finite element method (FEM) was used to run a numerical simulation on elastic buckling using ANSYS 2021 R1 software to validate the experimental results. The load-displacement relationships and deformed morphologies were investigated using experiments and numerical analysis. The topology arrangement and relative density of the polymer core were examined using the SEM micro-tomography test based on porosity distribution to check the resistance of the sandwich to buckling load. PETG/Al sandwich plates have been found to have critical buckling loads that are 2.52 % higher than PLA/Al sandwich plates, while TPU/Al sandwich plates show increased essential loads of buckling of 5.139 %. The FEM and experiment results show that the existence of porosity in the PLA core in the PFGM plate can reduce the buckling strength tremendously, about 10.52% and 6.8 %, respectively. It was evident that the numerical results show a good agreement with the experimental findings, with a maximum discrepancy of no more than 12 % occurring at the (TPU/Al) sandwich plate with a porosity of 30%.