Effect of the foam core density on the bending response on sandwich composites

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a current study of sandwich panels manufactured by using homogeneous and multilayer core foams with the purpose of improving specific flexural stiffness modulus. In the present study, the core foams were produced by using Verre ScotchitTM-K20 hollow microspheres manufactured by 3M and the selected binder resin was epoxy 520 with hardener 523. The skin was a 2 mm thick carbon/epoxy laminate. The ARAMIS technique was used as an alternative technique to obtain accurate displacement fields. It was concluded that the multilayered panels with different loads of microspheres, putting higher percentage of microsphere in the center and lower in the outer layers, have also higher resistance and stiffness than the panels with homogeneous microsphere percentage cores. It was observed that both properties have a tendency to increase when the displacement rate increases from 0.5 mm/min to 10 mm/min for all architectures. Experimental stiffness agrees well with analytical model predictions.