Finite Element Investigation of the Influence of Foam Core Material Type and Thickness on the Cantilever Flexural Behavior of Carbon/Epoxy Sandwich Composites
Öz
Sandwich-based design solutions are widely used in aerospace, defense, automotive and electric vehicle applications owing to their high flexural stiffness and specific strength despite their low weight. In such structures, stiff face sheets mainly carry bending loads, while the low-density foam core transfers shear loads. Nevertheless, manufacturing and experimentally testing each core material brings about significant limitations in terms of time, cost and production repeatability. In this article, the cantilever bending behavior of sandwich composite structures consisting of 200 g/m² twill carbon/epoxy face sheets was dig out via finite element analysis by considering different foam core materials and core thicknesses. PVC foam, PET foam and PMI foam were selected as core materials, and 10 mm, 15 mm and 20 mm core thicknesses were evaluated for each material type. Thus, nine different sandwich composite configurations were created. Numerical analyses were carried out using ANSYS. The carbon/epoxy face sheets were defined as orthotropic materials, whereas the foam cores were modeled as isotropic linear elastic materials. Reaction force, X-direction normal stress in the carbon face sheets, X-direction normal stress in the foam core and XY shear stress in the foam core were considered as the main variables. The primary target of this work is to comparatively evaluate the influence of different foam core materials and core thicknesses through a pre-manufacturing numerical analysis approach. All configurations were evaluated comparatively under identical boundary conditions, material modeling assumptions and displacement-controlled loading conditions. In this context, the relative effects of core material type and core thickness on reaction force, carbon face sheet stress, foam core normal stress and foam core shear stress were investigated. The findings showed that finite element analysis can be utilized as an effective preliminary design tool for comparing the structural tendencies of different sandwich composite configurations.
Anahtar Kelimeler
Sandwich composite, Carbon fiber, Foam core, Cantilever beam, Finite element analyses, ANSYS
Kaynakça
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