Blast resistance of metallic double arrowhead honeycomb sandwich panels with different core configurations under the paper tube-guided air blast loading

A B S T R A C T Auxetic double arrowhead honeycombs (DAHs) featured by negative Poisson's ratio is attracting increasing attention owing to their tailorable mechanical properties and outstanding energy absorption capability. In this paper, the two-dimensional metallic DAHs were produced and used as the sandwich cores to construct the large-size double arrowhead honeycomb sandwich panels (DAHSPs). A comprehensive experimental investigation on their dynamic responses under the paper tube-guided air blasts was conducted. It majorly focused on the influence of core configurations induced by the variation of core wall thickness, horizontal distance, inclined angles, thickness allocations and foam filling on the deformation/failure modes, associated mechanisms and blast resistance of the target panels. Fair comparisons among different design strategies were performed to evaluate their relative performance. Experimental results show that relative to increasing the core wall thickness, the decrease of horizontal distance is more remarkable to reduce the back face deflection upon the similar weight expense, whereas the effect of inclined angles is limited due to the competition between enhanced bending stiffness and deteriorated transmitted load. A more efficient approach to decrease the back face deformation is to enlarge the inclined angles when the core relative density is relatively low but to decrease the horizontal distance at a high level of relative density. A further improvement of blast resistance can be achieved by allocating more mass to the stuffer wall rather than the tendon one, or by introducing a gradient DAH core instead of the homogeneous one. Compared to adjusting the metallic DAH core itself, the lightweight polyurethane (PU) foam filling is a more competitive manner to promote the blast performance. The preliminary numerical simulations confirmed the shock focusing effect of the paper tube support and indicated reasonable agreement with the experimental results. The present study is supposed to shed light on the design, manufacturing and optimization of auxetic sandwich structures for protection applications.