A new method for the study of parabolic impact of foam-core sandwich panels

Lightweight sandwich panels with composite facesheets and foam core have high impact energy absorption capability and are widely employed in multifunctional applications such as aircraft and marine structures. The dynamic behaviour of sandwich panels is typically studied for impact loading at normal angle of incidence but the structures are more frequently loaded at some oblique angle or with a complex tri-dimensional trajectory in real engineering situations. The damage area and damage modes for these trajectories are significantly different and it is not sufficient to study only normal impacts. There are well established experimental protocols for normal or oblique impact tests using devices like the drop tower, but impacts with complex trajectory are difficult to characterise experimentally. In this paper, a Gough-Stewart platform with six degrees of freedom has been modified to develop an original tri-dimensional impact device called Hexapod. The trajectory is defined to an impactor attached to the seventh jack of the Hexapod to study the response of sandwich plates to impact loading with complex trajectories. The applicability of the newly developed device is demonstrated by studying parabolic impact with different trajectories on sandwich plates with Kevlar facesheets and Rohacell foam core. The time history of vertical and horizontal components of force is measured using tri-axial load cell and strain history is obtained from Digital Image Correlation of a high speed camera images. The results of the parabolic impact show the importance of shear behaviour of the foam in the progression of damage in the sandwich panels. Additionally, the response of the sandwich panels to parabolic impact was simulated numerically using explicit finite element code LS-DYNA. The results of the FE model are compared with experimental data in terms of the force history and strain contours.