Failure analysis of foam core sandwich composites under three-point bending

摘要

Sandwich composites are receiving increasingly attention because of its wide applications inlightweight vehicles.Such composites consist of two stiff face sheets that carry the loads and bonedby a lightweight core that transfers shear between the face sheets.Hence large flexural stiffnessto weight ratio is achieved for this type of material.Various damage modes have been reportedin literature for sandwich composites under bending.These competing failure mechanisms dependon the face sheet and core material properties,geometry of the beam,and testing method.In thisstudy,foam core sandwich panels with various face-sheet/core combinations were loaded quasistaticallyaccording to ASTM C393 standard.A high-resolution camera and the digital imagecorrelation technique (DIC) were utilized to calculate the displacement and identify the damagemodes.