Buckling of honeycomb structures under out-of-plane loads

Abstract

The governing equations for the buckling of honeycomb cores with various cell geometries under combined compression and shear are established and three types of core including rectangular, hexagonal and triangular cores are under consideration. After invoking the Bloch wave representation form, the equations are simplified by the periodicity and the hypothesis that the out-of-plane displacement remains zero at the intersections. Different cell geometries and load cases are taken into account and numerical results offer validation for the analytical solutions. Moreover, the results of Finite Element (FE) models show that the fine results can only be acquired by models with appropriate cell numbers. Experimental study is conducted on the regular hexagonal honeycomb structures. Both the results of the numerical benchmarks and the experiments prove the effectiveness of the proposed analytical method and the hypothesis for predicting the buckling load of honeycomb structures.