Sandwich composite materials have been widely used in recent years for the construction of spacecraft, aircraft, and ships, mainly because of their high stiffness-to-weight ratios. The dynamic bending stiffness of such materials is difficult to measure because it depends on frequency unlike ordinary non-composite materials. In this paper, Nilsson's sixth-order differential equation model is reviewed and the frequency response function method is used to characterize the dynamic bending stiffness of sandwich beams with foam filled honeycomb cores. The four-point bending method is used to characterize the static bending stiffness. Experiments with static and vibrating beams show that these methods can yield good estimates for the dynamic bending stiffness.
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