Effect of impactor shapes on the low velocity impact damage of sandwich composite plate: Experimental study and modelling

Abstract

An experimental and numerical analysis of the influence of impactor shapes on the low velocity impact performance of aluminium sandwich composite plates has been carried out. The aluminium composite panels were manufactured by using two aluminium sheets and a low density polyethylene core under heat and pressure, which shows the outstanding properties of low weight, good rigidity and impact resistance. Experimental tests were performed using drop weight test machine, samples were impacted using steel conical, ogival, hemispherical and flat impactors, all 12 mm in diameter, for different initial impact energies of 29.43 J and 44.15 J and specimen thickness of 4 mm containing three different parts (0.5 + 3.0 + 0.5). A three dimensional non-linear finite element model is developed for simulating the impact behaviour of sandwich composite plate and the ABAQUS/Explicit commercial program was used. The face sheet material aluminium alloy 3003-O of the plate was modelled as isotropic with elastic-plastic characteristics. The description of the material characteristic of the attenuator was made by means of the Johnson-Cook elastic-plastic law. The material constitutive law of the Al 3003 plates has been implemented in a user-defined subroutine UMAT. The foam core was modelled as a crushable foam material. The finite element results showed a good correlation to the experimental data in terms of contact-force histories, energy histories, absorbed energy, and failure of the sandwich composite was observed between the experimental data. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd.