An Effective Method of Modeling the Deformation Behavior of Polymer Sandwich Structures with Adhesive Joints

Abstract

AbstractPolymer sandwich structures have high bending stiffness and strength and also low weight. Therefore, they are widely used in the transportation industry. In the conceptual design phase, it is essential to have a method to model the mechanical behavior of the sandwich and its adhesive joints accurately in full-vehicle scale to investigate different structure partitioning strategies. In this paper, a novel approach using finite element modeling is introduced. The sandwich panels are modeled with layered shells and the joint lines with general stiffness matrices. Stiffness parameters of the face-sheets and the core material are obtained via mechanical tests. Stiffness parameters of the joints are determined by using the method of Design of Experiments, where detailed sub-models of the joints serve as a reference. These models are validated with experimental tests of glass-fiber reinforced vinyl ester matrix composite sandwich structure with a foam core. By using two joint designs and three reference geometries, it is shown that the method is suitable to describe the deformation behavior in a full-vehicle scale with sufficient accuracy.