Abstract
Honeycomb sandwich structures, composed of many regularly arranged hexagonal cores and two skins, show excellent impact performance due to strong energy absorption capability under impact loads. In this paper, a numerical study of low velocity impact on honeycomb sandwich panels filled with circular tubes in the in-plane direction was performed. To calibrate the numerical model, simulation results in the out-of-plane direction are compared with the experimental ones. The numerical modelling of the drop weight test was carried out using the nonlinear explicit finite element code Abaqus/Explicit. The impact responses are presented as the contact force between the impactor and the panel versus the time. It was concluded that the filled honeycomb panel absorbs the same amount of impact energy in a shorter time than an empty one. In addition, the deflections of the front and back face-sheets are investigated. The panel degradation and the stress distribution during the crushing are also discussed.
Highlights
A honeycomb sandwich is a structure that consists of two relatively thin facesheets bonded to a relatively thick lightweight honeycomb core [1]
The finite element (FE) model was developed to investigate the dynamic response of the empty honeycomb sandwich (EHS) and circular tubes filled honeycomb sandwich (CTFHS) panels subjected to low velocity impacts in the in-plane direction
It was concluded that filling the empty honeycomb core with circular tubes increases the stiffness of the CTFHS panel and leads to absorb the entire impact energy more quickly than the EHS panel
Summary
A honeycomb sandwich is a structure that consists of two relatively thin facesheets bonded to a relatively thick lightweight honeycomb core [1]. The addition of a lightweight core between facesheets increases the moment of inertia with a slight increase in weight generating an effective bending- and buckling-resistant composite structure For this reason, these sandwich panels are very common in structural uses for a wide range of applications in the aerospace and automotive industry that require low weight, high bending strength and high energy absorption capability [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. The dynamic behaviour of honeycomb structure in the in-plane direction under impact loading is needs to be investigated This domain is not extensively studied, some articles are published on it [31,32,33,34]. The panel degradation and the stress distribution during the crushing are discussed
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