Strength and stiffness characteristics of A3003 aluminum honeycomb core sandwich panels

Abstract

The demand for lightweight structures made of sandwich panels is ever increasing in many Industrial sectors. World over numerous researches are actively pursued on several aspects of sandwich in this area in terms of weight and cost reduction. Sandwich panel is a composite structure and it is an excellent alternative material in place of weight reduction without sacrificing its strength and stiffness characteristics. Sandwich panels consist typically of two thin face sheets and a lightweight thicker core. The core provides low density, relatively high out of plane compression, stiffness and shear properties. These panels find wide application in public transport industry, aeronautical sectors, building industries, tooling machines and serigraphy. Today every engineered product undergoes an analysis before realizing production and with ubiquitous application of AHCS panel, it’s imperative that static properties of AHCS panel are precisely known in order to predict behavior of the structure. The heterogeneous nature of honeycomb core and complex load transfer paths make it behave like orthotropic material and prediction of stiffness becomes tedious and difficult. The geometrical characteristics of honeycomb core sandwich panels as well as their mechanical properties such as compressive strength, flexural stiffness, core shear moduli, shear strength and stiffness are analyzed. In this paper, the stiffness of Al hexagonal core sandwich panel of different span length is determined by Finite Element and the same is compared with theoretically obtained results. The sandwich panels are available in various shapes and sizes to the service requirement. The commercially available sandwich panels have different core materials such as foams, FRPs and metallic and nonmetallic materials. The structure of the core typically varies as truss type and honeycomb. The face sheets and the core materials are bonded using thermo-set resins.