Numerical study on three-point bending behavior of honeycomb sandwich with ceramic tile

Honeycomb sandwich structures have been extensively investigated in the past decades. A kind of innovative honeycomb sandwich with ceramic tile (ceramic sandwich), was investigated here for its bending behavior by using finite-element model implemented in Abaqus/Explicit code. In our studies, a series numerical simulations of three-point bending were carried out for the ceramic sandwich and conventional aluminum honeycomb sandwich. Their numerical models were validated by experiments. As confirmed that the ceramic tile largely enhances the stiffness of the structure, which contributes a lot to the promotion of the bending resistance capacity. Parametric studies were performed to further investigate the effects brought from the ceramic tile and honeycomb core in terms of changing the thickness of ceramic tile, the thickness of honeycomb wall, the length of honeycomb cells. It was found that the bending performance heavily relay on the geometric configuration of the present sandwich panel. In addition, the ceramic sandwich with reinforced honeycomb core also shows better mechanical behavior in the simulation. All these achievements provide more likelihood of designing composited high-performance sandwich.