The residual compressive strength of impact-damaged sandwich structures with pyramidal truss cores

A combined experimental and numerical study is conducted to assess the effects of impact energy, impact site and core density on the compression-after-impact (CAI) strength of pyramidal truss core sandwich structures. It is found that the severity of impact damage highly depends on the impact site. The CAI tests show that the local buckling occurs for both the un-impact specimens and the specimens impacted under lower energy, while debonding is observed for the specimens impacted under higher energy. In case of the specimens impacted on the middle point of the four adjacent nodes, only a crack appears in the impact-damaged facesheet, which propagates transversely across the facesheet. It is observed that the CAI strength of specimens impacted on the middle point of four adjacent nodes drop much more than that of specimens impacted on the node, and that the specimens with higher density cores have slightly lower normalized CAI strength reduction. Moreover, it is found that the CAI strength of specimens impacted on the node decreases with the impact energy increasing. In addition to experimental tests, the numerical simulation performs well in capturing the failure modes for impact-damaged specimens under compressive load. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.