Preliminary Experiments on the Manufacture of Hollow Core Composite Panels

Abstract

Structural honeycomb panels consist of a lightweight, often paper, honeycomb column core between two thin, stiff face sheets, which results in a very light structure with high strength and stiffness. These panels have long been used in the shipping and aerospace industries and for furniture components in Europe. The wider adoption of honeycomb panels by Canadian furniture manufacturers is hampered by a lack of experience and technical data on their manufacture, properties, and performance. This study attempts to address this missing information with a series of experiments to test the influence of Kraft paper honeycomb type, orientation, cell wall height, and face sheet type on sandwich strength properties (flexural, shear rigidity, and panel deflection). Failure of sandwich panels occurs by buckling of the honeycomb cell walls under the load point; panel load-bearing capacity is significantly improved by the use of stiff face sheets such as plywood. The strongest and stiffest panels are made with small honeycomb cells (16 mm). The extra cost and bulk associated with using paper-laminated pre-expanded honeycomb is not matched by increased bending strength and is therefore unnecessary. Bending strength is significantly enhanced by aligning the honeycomb so that the nodes and ribbon direction are perpendicular to the long axis (loading direction) of the panel due to the ability of the core to flex and conform to the curvature of the face sheets under load. The results from this study offer insights that furniture manufacturers may use to fabricate and potentially improve the properties of honeycomb sandwich panels.

Elastic properties of cellular wood panels with hexagonal and auxetic cores

“…This difference amounted to 35 % and resulted from the orientation in the direction of axis 2 of the gluing plane of two adjacent cell walls. A similar relationship was also reported by Sam -Brew et al (2011) . The same regularity was observed for the auxetic core.…”

“…These panels are usually employed as vertical construction elements of cabinet furniture. Shelves or horizontal partitions should have greater thickness due to their low stiffness (Barboutis and Vassiliou 2005 ;Sam -Brew et al 2011 ). Elastic properties of these materials are usually determined in accordance with the EN 310, 1993 standard.…”

“…Few studies were dealing with modeling of the mechanical properties of cellular panels with a paper honeycomb (Seidl 1956 ). Sam -Brew et al (2011) presented results on the effect of paper type, cell orientation, their height and arrangement on the rigidity and strength of cellular panels. In addition, there is a lack of results concerning cellular panels with a core having negative Poisson ' s coeffi cient (auxetic materials).…”

Calculation of Honeycomb Paperboard Resistance to Edge Crush Test

“…Honeycomb board is manufactured on the basis of fibrous materials, most often from coniferous trees. Due to the spatial structure, it has low specific weight and good strength properties [1,2]. Its advantages also include recyclability; excellent energy absorption properties; and insulation, thermal, and acoustic properties [3].…”

Mechanical Properties of Corner Joints Made of Honeycomb Panels with Double Arrow-Shaped Auxetic Cores

“…The forementioned studies focus only on the hexagonal shape of the core cells and involve fasteners. From the literature, it is evident that mechanical properties of honeycomb panel may be modified by changing the size and height of a core cell, hence their relative density [62,63]. Therefore, more attention should be put to the research aimed at furniture honeycomb panel elastic properties improvement by changing these features on the basis of the auxetic materials concept, ergo with negative Poisson's ratio [64][65][66].…”