Optimization Design Of Honeycomb Sandwich Panels With Crashworthiness Criterion

Honeycomb sandwich panels have been widely used in the field of aerospace.Nowadays, they are increasingly used in marine, rail vehicles and automobileindustries. The structural integrity and safety are directly influenced by the dynamicimpact characteristics of these sandwich panels. Except for the material properties ofcomponents, the crashworthiness of sandwich panels also have close relations withthe configurations of core cell and some dimensional parameters, such as cell width,thickness, included angle, height and so on. Therefore, it is with great necessity tostudy the relationship between the crashworthiness of sandwich panels and thesestructural parameters. On the ground of others’ researches, some common types ofsandwich panels have been optimized with crashworthiness criteria based on explicitfinite element techniques and response surface method in this paper.At the beginning of this dissertation, recent developments of impact behavior ofsandwich panels and crashworthiness optimization are briefly summarized. Then,some main theories used in the crashworthiness optimization design are introduced,such as explicit finite element techniques, design of experiments and response surfacemethod. After that, these theories and explicit finite element program LS-DYNA areused to analyze and optimize some sandwich panels with classical honeycomb coreand corrugated core.In the study on the honeycomb sandwich panels, the crashworthiness ofhexagonal honeycomb sandwich panel and the bare honeycomb core are firstlycompared with each other. Secondly, the parameters which have significant effects onthe crashworthiness of hexagonal honeycomb sandwich panels are determined throughfactor screening experiment. Thirdly, the hexagonal honeycomb sandwich panels areoptimized with the structural specific energy absorption as objective function, andwith the peak crushing force as restrained function. In addition, the sandwich panelswith square honeycomb core are optimized with constrained single-objective functionand multi-objective function respectively. Finally, the crashworthiness of two kinds ofoptimized honeycomb sandwich panels is compared. During the crashworthinessoptimization design of corrugated sandwich panels, the configurations of trapezoidaland triangular cells are firstly optimized with internal energy as objective function.Then, the components thicknesses of sandwich panels with optimum trapezoidal core are optimized in the field of crashworthiness. Finally, the crashworthiness of the twotypes of corrugated sandwich panels, which are with identical face plate thickness andcore density, are compared with each other in two cases of low-velocity local impactand planar impact loadings.This dissertation can be a reference for the crashworthiness optimization designof other types of sandwich panels to a certain extent. Meanwhile, the conclusions areguiding for the selection of cell configurations and structural parameters in thepractical engineering application.