The structure response of sandwich beams with metallic auxetic honeycomb cores under localized impulsive loading-experiments and finite element analysis

In recent years, auxetic cellular materials such as auxetic reentrant honeycombs were widely studied due to its attractively negative Poisson's ratio. In this manuscript, the structure response of end-clamped sandwich beam with auxetic reentrant hexagonal aluminum honeycomb core locally subjected to foam projectile with high-velocity impact was experimentally and numerically studied. The reentrant honeycomb cores with different cell-wall thicknesses were fabricated by selective laser melting (SLM). According to experiment results, the failure modes of the sandwich beam were investigated. It was found that sandwich beam with different honeycomb cell's thicknesses could fail in different modes. Meanwhile, the local negative Poisson's ratio deformation was observed in the thin honeycomb core. Based on this, a finite element (FE) model was constructed to analysis the dynamic deformation evolution of two face sheets and auxetic reentrant honeycomb core. The local auxetic and expand deformations of honeycomb core were both found. Finally, the residual deflections of sandwich beam under impulsive loadings were discussed.