Experimental and numerical investigation of lattice core sandwich beams under low-velocity bending impact

The performance of sandwich beams with expanded metal sheets as core was studied under transverse impact loading. Relationships between the force and displacement at the mid-span of the sandwich beams were obtained from the experiments. Numerical simulations were carried out using ABAQUS/EXPLICT and the results were thoroughly compared with the experimental results. Then, the influence of the core layer number, cell orientation, size of the cell, and thickness of the substrates was investigated. The results showed that the increase in the core layers up to three times increased the energy absorption ( E a ) by 33.88%. Moreover, increasing the thickness by up to three times increased the E a by 61.33%. It was found that effects of the cell size and cell orientation on the E a were dependent on each other, governing the low-velocity impact response of the sandwich beams with lattice cores.