Anti-explosion performance analysis and dynamic response characteristics of titanium metal sandwich panels with various core configurations

The titanium metal sandwich panel was designed to satisfy the ultimate demand of achieving outstanding anti-explosion performance. Compared with bonded steel honeycomb and aluminum alloy honeycomb, this paper prepared titanium metal honeycomb material using laser welding method. The honeycomb core was hot pressed and compounded with Ti–6Al–4V alloy plate through an autoclave process, highlighting the lightweight advantage. Using mechanical testing methods, it found that the specific energy absorption and platform stress of titanium metal honeycomb materials vary approximately proportional to their specific strength. Using the evaluation parameters of anti-convex deformation coefficient( P ^†_c), energy dissipation, and clipping rate, air explosion tests and simulations were used to evaluate lattice and honeycomb sandwich panels with similar areal densities. The result showed that the honeycomb core had lower specific strength (reducing 2.8 kN m/kg) and better anti-explosion performance ( P ^†_c increases 0.07), and innovatively proposed that the anti-explosion performance was approximately negatively correlated with the cores’ dynamic specific strength( c _u). Namely, P ^†_c = f ( c _u) = 2.76785 × 10⁻⁴ c _u² - 0.04452 c _u + 3.38518, and the c _u should be selected within the range of 48.8–74.9 kN m/kg. The increase in c _u can lead to more severe fracture failure of the front face of the sandwich panel, and may even cause fracture failure of the back face. The overall failure characteristics of the lattice and honeycomb sandwich panel is similar. But in the local failure mode, wrinkles and local buckling deformation occur on the side of the honeycomb cell near the blast surface, and a bifurcation phenomenon occurs between some of the cell wall welding points.