Punching experiments on wide honeycomb sandwich beams were performed to
evaluate the predictive capabilities of a newly developed constitutive model in
structural applications. The employed constitutive model for plastically compressible
orthotropic materials accounts for both non-uniform hardening and softening
associated with stressing in different directions. This feature is vital when assessing
the structural performance of metal sandwich plates with low density cellular cores.
Pure shear and uniaxial compression tests have been carried out to identify the
input stress-strain data for the constitutive model. The sandwich beam has
been modeled with shell/beam elements for the face sheets and only one
continuum element through-the-thickness for the honeycomb core material.
Comparison of the numerical results with experimental observations validates the
capability of the proposed approach based on continuum modeling of the core
in capturing the main features of sandwich beam response under punch
loading.
Keywords
sandwich structures, finite element modeling, constitutive
modeling, metallic honeycomb, plasticity