Investigations of polyester pinned foam filled honeycomb sandwich panels

Abstract

Composite sandwich panels are a unique type of composite materials which are popular and always in demand due to its high strength-to-weight ratio and flexural stiffness. Sandwich panels are widely used in multifunctional applications, mainly owing to their comparative advantages to other materials. It consists of two thin but stiff and strong composite face sheets bonded on either side of a lightweight core. Sandwich panel possesses benefits such as excellent energy absorption, thermal insulation and acoustic damping. Due to increasing competition and fast-growing emerging markets as a result of globalization, companies are under pressure to innovate and develop ultra-lightweight sandwich panels that have considerably high newlinespecific strength and flexural stiffness, than the currently available panels. In this study, five types of sandwich panel were developed. They are Foam filled Honeycomb Sandwich panel (FHS) and Pin incorporated Foam filled Honeycomb Sandwich panels (PFHS) with four different diameter of pins such as 2 mm, 2.5 mm, 3 mm and 3.5 mm, corresponding panels specified as PFHS2, PFHS2.5, PFHS3 and PFHS3.5, respectively. For all sandwich panels, honeycomb core made of aluminium alloy 3003 filled with polyurethane foam and glass fiber reinforced polyester as face sheets were utilized. The polyester resin that was used in the face sheets was utilized to made pins. The static and dynamic mechanical tests such as flatwise compression, edgewise compression, three-point bending, low velocity impact and Compression After Impact (CAI) were conducted as per ASTM standards to analyse the response of sandwich panels. newline newline