Experimental and numerical study of bending behavior for honeycomb sandwich panel with different core configurations

Honeycomb sandwich panel dies are manufactured with different core shapes (hexagonal, circular and square), each shape have two types of facing, one of aluminum facing AA3003 with different thicknesses(0.5mm, 0.9mm &2mm) and the other of composite facing (Eglass+epoxy resin) with(2-layers and 3-layers). Three point bending test is used to investigate the strength of these honeycombs. The results shown that the square honeycomb's core shape have the highest load from the other core shapes and the hexagonal have the lowest value and this value increased by increasing the facing thickness, and the aluminum skin facing have higher load than the composite skin facing. The strength to weight ratio was calculated and its conclusion observed that the square honeycomb core shape have the maximum ratio and the circular honeycomb core shape have the minimum ratio. ANSYS software was used to analyze the honeycomb structure by madea model in APDL-ANSYS program in static and natural frequency tests using solid and shell elements and MPC algorithm. Results shown that there are the variations in deflection by percentage of error 27%. The dynamic test observed that the changing of skin facing thickness effect in the natural frequencies by (3%- 30%) and the changing of the core configurations by (19.7%-38.8%), and by changing the facing material the natural frequencies effected by (10.6%-37.3%).