Structural performance of metallic sandwich beams with hollow truss cores

The article focuses on the structural performance of sandwich beams with hollow truss lattice cores made from a ductile stainless steel. The trusses are arranged in an orthogonal (cross-ply) configuration, in either 45 degrees (diamond) or 0 degrees/90 degrees (square) orientations with respect to the face sheets. The responses in shear, tension and compression, as well as simply supported and fully clamped bending, are measured for specimens with both core orientations. While the two cores perform equally well in compression, the diamond orientation exhibits higher shear strength but lower stretch resistance. For bend-dominated loadings of the sandwich beams, the core in the diamond orientation is preferred because of its higher shear strength. For stretch-dominated loadings encountered in large-displacement, fully clamped bending, the square orientation is superior. Models of core and beam yielding are used to rationalize these observations. Optimizations are then performed to identify strong lightweight designs and to enable performance comparisons with other sandwich structures. (c) 2006 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.