Sandwich Panel with Different Web Cores Under Blast Loading

With the rapid development of technologies used in weapons, a threat to the public structure, human lives, and other important structures is also increased. Thus, to ensure the safety of the structure and its occupants, it becomes important to upgrade the protection levels to the required extent. For this, making a better understanding and analyzing the efficiency of protective structures against such extreme loadings is peremptory. Sandwich panel is one such design, which emerges as one of the effective alternatives to the conventional solid plate, to withstand the blast load. In recent time, it is attracting great attention from researchers and protective design engineers due to its intriguing properties and availability of different web cores. As a protective structure, sandwich panel, with a variety of solid cores, have shown superior strength and higher weight-specific stiffness to resist blast loads. In this study, numerical models of sandwich panels with three different core configurations i.e., hexagonal, square, and triangular cores are prepared and analyzed by employing LS-DYNA®. Models with three different shapes of unit cells are prepared for each core configuration. Each panel is subjected to blast load resulting from three different scaled distances considered in this study. The response of each panel is analyzed in terms of midpoint deflection and the amount of energy dissipated. From the analysis, it is observed that the panels with hexagonal core shows the best performance among the cores considered in this study. Further, the performance of the square core is better than the performance of panels with the triangular core.