Modified honeycomb cores for enhancing the durability of sandwich structures under low-velocity impact

Abstract

Honeycomb cores are essential components of composite sandwich structures, and enhancing their ability to withstand out-of-plane loads can improve the resilience of sandwich structures under low-velocity transverse impacts. Therefore, this study computationally investigates the potential for improving the out-of-plane strength of honeycomb cores by superposing periodic sinusoidal perturbations to their cell walls. Such perturbations have been used to enhance the acoustic properties of honeycomb cores. Results demonstrated that introducing these perturbations can improve the strength of honeycomb cores under localized out-of-plane loadings resembling colliding with small objects at low impact speeds. Superposed perturbations increased the out-of-plane strength by a maximum of 28.5 % and eliminated the post-buckling softening behavior. Moreover, they increased the toughness, represented by the area under the force-displacement curve, under localized out-of-plane loads by a maximum of 56.7%. The perturbed honeycomb cores showed more sensitivity to the frequency of the superposed perturbations than their magnitude.