Investigation of the enhancement of sandwich panel

• Main Author: Lim, Adrian Eu Chun.
• Other Authors: Choi Haejin
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Materials::Defence materials
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/18041
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Sandwich panel belong to a family of Blast Resistance Panel (BRP), which is consist of two outer face sheets sandwiching a core. It is design to withstand blast by dissipating energy through plastic deformation. The main challenge in designing a sandwich panel is to reduce its deflection and increase its energy absorption under blast loading. This report present an investigation on the effect of inter layer, the effect of sandwich panel structure, the effect of metal foam core and the difference in uniform loading and spherical blasting. The investigation involve six models, the initial model was a square honeycomb core sandwich panel followed by an addition of interlayer at the face sheet - core interface. In the third model, solid plate of same weight was considered and used instead of honeycomb core. The fourth and fifth models were of circular sandwich panel with square honey comb core and metal foam core respectively. The final model was similar to the initial model except for the loading which was considered to be of a spherical pressure pattern. The materials used are steel (face sheets and core), polyurethane (inter layer) and Alporas metal foam (core). Except for the final model, the blast loading applied is uniform pressure. The simulation is carried out using a commercial code Abaqus. The results from the first comparison suggest that the 2mm polyurethane inter layer does not bring a significant difference in improving the performance of the sandwich panel. The sandwich panel structure has a clear advantage over the solid plate, as it improves the performance by both reducing the deflection and increasing the energy absorption. Metal foam core has the advantage of absorbing about ten times more than the steel square honeycomb core but its deflection increases as well by 100%. Lastly, the spherical blasting cause deformation at the edge of the sandwich panel at the initial stage before it propagates towards the center while uniform pressure cause a uniformly distributed deformation throughout the whole panel.