Plastic-plastic analysis of honeycomb sandwich panel by using honeycomb element

This paper presents a simple method for structural analysis of honeycomb sandwich panel (HSP), which is used as light weight and high stiffness material. It is shown that the rigidity of honeycomb core is very influential to the stiffness of HSP when HSP is subjected to bending load, and elastic and plastic moduli of rigidity are given by honeycomb parameters such as cell size and cell wall thickness. Therefore the authors propose the finite element model for structural analysis of HSP, which can simulate the HSP deformed behavior without detailed hexagonal mesh. The analyses results given by the proposed element agree with the results of the experiment and the detailed meshing analyses. This element doesn't reduce the precision but significantly reduces the time for pre and post processes, and analyses.