Guidelines for Design of Honeycomb FRP Sandwich Panels

Abstract

Honeycomb Fiber-Reinforced Polymer (HFRP) sandwich panels with sinusoidal core geometry have shown to be successful both for new construction and rehabilitation of existing bridge decks. The development of standards and guidelines is needed in order to promote wider acceptance of composite sandwich products in construction. Much effort has been devoted to the modeling, optimization, and strength evaluation of the HFRP panel at West Virginia University, in terms of both experimental investigations and analytical solutions. This paper first summarizes all the findings, including out-of-plane compression failure and buckling, shear buckling, shear failure, and delamination at interface due to shear-tension coupling of out-of-plane shear; and progressive failure of laminated facesheet. And then, using the analytical models obtained, parametric studies are carried out and equations are provided to describe the influence of such parameters as interface bonding layer numbers, core wall thicknesses, and facesheet configurations. Next, through correlations with existing experimental results, design guidelines are proposed considering various failure modes. Finally, the proposed guidelines are used to evaluate the strength of HFRP sandwich panels and verify their applicability in practice. All methods presented in this paper can be extended to study other types of sandwich panels.