Light Weight Applications of Sandwich Panels in Various Industries

Abstract

Sandwich construction is of particular interest and widely used, because the concept is very suitable and amenable to the development of lightweight structures with high in-plane and flexural stiffness. Sandwich panels consist typically of two thin face sheets (or facings, or skins) and a lightweight thicker core. Commonly used materials for facings are composite laminates and metals, while cores are made of metallic and nonmetallic honeycombs, cellular foams, balsa wood and trusses. The facings carry almost all of the bending and in-plane loads and the core helps to stabilize the facings and defines the flexural stiffness and out-of-plane shear and compressive behavior. The overall performance of sandwich structures depends on the material properties of the constituents (facings, adhesive and core), geometric dimensions and type of loading. Sandwich structures have now been widely used for load-bearing purposes in the aerospace, land transport, marine and civil construction industries due to their lightweight, high specific bending stiffness and strength under distributed loads in addition to their good energy-absorbing capacity. For applications in the aerospace industry, meeting the minimum damage tolerance requirement has a profound effect on the design of sandwich panels. Usually, the layup and thickness of composite skins as well as the density and thickness of the core need to be tailored in a design analysis to meet a specific performance requirement.

In this paper, an overview of sandwich constructions for various applications with recent developments has been addressed with some concepts of sandwich effect. This effort towards literature on development of sandwich constructions for various applications would throw some light for designers as a ‘choice’ of material for various applications.

Keywords:Sandwich Construction, facings, core, honeycomb