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Three-point bending of honeycomb sandwich beams with facesheet perforations

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Abstract

A novel square honeycomb-cored sandwich beam with perforated bottom facesheet is investigated under three-point bending, both analytically and numerically. Perforated square holes in the bottom facesheet are characterized by the area ratio of the hole to intact facesheet (perforation ratio). While for large-scale engineering applications like the decks of cargo vehicles and transportation ships, the perforations are needed to facilitate the fabrication process (e.g., laser welding) as well as service maintenance, it is demonstrated that these perforations, when properly designed, can also enhance the resistance of the sandwich to bending. For illustration, fair comparisons among competing sandwich designs having different perforation ratios but equal mass is achieved by systematically thickening the core webs. Further, the perforated sandwich beam is designed with a relatively thick facesheet to avoid local indention failure so that it mainly fails in two competing modes: (1) bending failure, i.e., yielding of beam cross-section and buckling of top facesheet caused by bending moment; (2) shear failure, i.e., yielding and buckling of core webs due to shear forcing. The sensitivity of the failure loads to the ratio of core height to beam span is also discussed for varying perforation ratios. As the perforation ratio is increased, the load of shear failure increases due to thickening core webs, while that of bending failure decreases due to the weakening bottom facesheet. Design of a sandwich beam with optimal perforation ratio is realized when the two failure loads are equal, leading to significantly enhanced failure load (up to 60% increase) relative to that of a non-perforated sandwich beam with equal mass.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants 11472209, 11472208), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant 2016M600782), the Postdoctoral Scientific Research Project of Shaanxi Province (Grant 2016BSHYDZZ18), the Fundamental Research Funds for Xi’an Jiaotong University (Grant xjj2015102), and the Jiangsu Province Key Laboratory of High-end Structural Materials (Grant hsm1305).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory for Strength and Vibration of Mechanical Structures, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China

    Pengbo Su, Bin Han, Zhongnan Zhao, Qiancheng Zhang & Tian Jian Lu

  2. MOE Key Laboratory for Multifunctional Materials and Structures, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China

    Pengbo Su, Zhongnan Zhao, Qiancheng Zhang & Tian Jian Lu

  3. School of Mechanical Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China

    Bin Han

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  1. Pengbo Su
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  2. Bin Han
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  3. Zhongnan Zhao
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  4. Qiancheng Zhang
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  5. Tian Jian Lu
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Correspondence to Bin Han or Tian Jian Lu.

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Su, P., Han, B., Zhao, Z. et al. Three-point bending of honeycomb sandwich beams with facesheet perforations. Acta Mech. Sin. 34, 667–675 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10409-017-0734-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10409-017-0734-z

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