Crashworthiness optimization of corrugated sandwich panels

As a class of important lightweight structural components, sandwich panels have gained considerable popularity in a range of engineering applications. The crashworthiness of sandwich structures, which signifies a key mechanical property under impact loading, is found largely related to shape and dimensional parameters, such as cell width, wall thickness, structural angle and core height. This study exemplifies corrugated sandwich panels with trapezoidal and triangular cores to determine the relationship between the structural parameters and the crashworthiness under low-velocity local impact and planar impact, further optimizing these structural parameters with the crashworthiness criteria by using multiobjective optimization techniques. The configurations of trapezoidal and triangular core cells are firstly optimized for maximizing energy absorption. The wall thickness of sandwich panels with optimal trapezoidal core shape is then optimized for crashworthiness. Finally, the crashworthiness of these two types of corrugated sandwich panels is compared with each other under the identical face sheet thickness and core density and it is found that the triangular configuration has better performance. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.