High temperature mechanical behaviors of lightweight ceramic corrugated core sandwich panel

Lightweight design of high temperature ceramic is in urgent need, as their engineering application requires higher payload. Current approach to design lightweight ceramic is either porous ceramics or ceramic foams. Here, as a new approach, ZrO₂ ceramic corrugated core sandwich panel is proposed for lightweight design. The high temperature mechanical behaviors are systematically obtained through experimental measurements, theoretical analysis and numerical simulation. Under room temperature and 1000 °C, the compressive strength are as high as 11.8 and 8.5 MPa, and the stiffness are 375.9 and 340.9 MPa, which agree well with the analytical predictions. The specific bending strengths are 124.3 MPa/(g/cm³) under room temperature and 114.6 MPa/(g/cm³) under 1000 °C, which are twice higher than that of the ZrO₂ bulk ceramic. We reveal that with increasing temperature up to 1000 °C, the critical relative density for the failure models under compression shows significant change, while the failure model boundaries under three point bending display small difference. Moreover, the finite element analysis reveals that distinguished stress peaks are as high as 748 MPa in compression and 710 MPa in bending. The peak stresses locate at the connections between the facesheets and core sheets, and illustrate the failure mechanism of the experimentally observed failure models.