Design and Analysis of Multi Layered Al-2014 Aluminium Foam Core Sandwich Panels

Abstract

The sandwich panel exhibits higher stiffness than simple panels. The specific stiffness of sandwich panels depends on various factors like width, length, panel’s thickness, thickness of the face plate and core’s thickness of panels and type of materials used. Because of interaction effect between core and face plate, there is possibility of getting higher stiffness in multi-layered sandwich panels. In addition, incorporation of faceplate and core in the core structure varies the shear modulus and elastic modulus of core of the sandwich. However very limited research has been conducted on analytical modelling of multi-layered sandwich panels for their designing. In the present work analytical model has been developed to analyse the multilayer sandwich panels in terms of shear rigidity. flexural rigidity and deflection as a function of face plate thickness, core thickness, number of layers and beam width. Four types of specimens, those are single layer, double layer, triple layer and quadruple layer sandwich beam were prepared for this study. The deflection of the sandwich beam was measured by UTM (ultimate tensile machine). For core, Al- foam has been used and the theoretical values of elastic modulus and shear modulus were taken from the data available for cores of Al- foam synthesized at AMPRI, Bhopal. The deflection at 1000 N calculated theoretically for single layer and quadruple layer was 14.966 mm and 0.559 mm respectively. The practical calculation of deflection was 15.608 mm for single layer and 0.557 mm for quadruple layer. The practical and theoretical calculations were in well agreement. Further, it was understood that multi-layered sandwich panels are much more advantageous in terms of low deflection than single layer or double or triple sandwich panel.