Numerical Analysis on Failure Behavior of Composite Sandwich Plate

Abstract

The Composite sandwich plate is made of two laminated face-sheets and one core material. Since such a kind of structure has many advantages, they have been widely used in structural manufacturing industry. However, when sandwich plates are impacted by transverse loadings, damages that are usually invisible would occur inside the sandwich plate and those damages would potentially reduce the structural safety. Therefore, it is necessary to elucidate the failure mechanism and how they affect the failure behaviors of sandwich structures for safety purpose. To this end, the present study is to investigate the impact failure behaviors of sandwich plates subjected to a rigid spherical impactor. Numerical simulation approach is carried out by finite element method. To predict the initial failure, several failure criteria to face-sheets and core material are proposed. In addition, to further simulate the progressive failure behaviors, a stiffness modification method is proposed and incorporated into the finite element software. The analytical results show that the local failure including fiber breakages, delamination, core cracking and plasticity is the main failure mechanism of cases studied. Furthermore, parametric study is also conducted and discussed in the paper.