Failure characteristics of a thin metallic sandwich plate with metallic sheared dimple cores under low-velocity impact loading

The functionality and the performance of a lightweight sandwich plate with periodic cellular metal (PCM) cores are influenced by failure characteristics of the lightweight sandwich plate. The goal of this paper is to investigate the failure characteristics of a thin metallic sandwich plate with metallic sheared dimple cores under low-velocity impact loading through nonlinear finite element analysis. The influence of the imperfection mode of the cores on the impact response of a thin sandwich plate is examined to obtain a proper simulation model. Repeated finite element analyses are performed to examine the failure modes of the sandwich plate for different impact conditions. Normalized impact parameters are defined in order to generalize a dynamic failure map (DFM). DFMs of the thin metallic sandwich plate have been estimated via the regression analysis of critical impact conditions for each failure mode. In addition, the influence of the normalized impact parameters on the failure mode has been investigated using the DFM.