A comparative study of blast resistance of cylindrical sandwich panels with aluminum foam and auxetic honeycomb cores

The dynamic response of cylindrical sandwich panels with aluminum foam core, hexagonal honeycomb core, and auxetic honeycomb core are compared numerically. A novel curved auxetic honeycomb core is designed, and the finite element models are built by employing ABAQUS–Explicit. To calibrate the numerical models, the experiments of sandwich panels with honeycomb core and aluminum foam cores are modeled. And the numerical results have a good agreement with the experiment date. The calibrated numerical models are used to simulate the dynamic response of cylindrical panels subject to external blast loadings. It is found that the cylindrical panels with auxetic honeycomb cores have a better performance than that with aluminum foam cores and hexagonal honeycomb cores in resisting blast loadings. A material concentration effect was observed in the auxetic honeycomb core due to the negative Poisson's ratio (NPR) effect. According to parameter studies, it is concluded that with the increase of curvature and face sheet thickness the blast-resistance of panels with both auxetic honeycomb core, hexagonal honeycomb core, and foam cores increased obviously, especially the panels with auxetic honeycomb cores. For the panels with auxetic honeycomb cores, increasing the back face sheet thickness can improve the blast-resistance performance more efficiently than increasing the thickness of front face sheet, which is opposite for the panels with foam cores and hexagonal honeycomb cores. Auxetic cores with a smaller unit cell aspect ratio and a smaller unit cell length ratio has a larger Poisson's ratio, and achieves better blast resistance performance. These simulation findings can guide well the theoretical study and optimal design of cylindrical sandwich structures subject to external blast loading.