Impact behaviour of bio-inspired sandwich panels integrally manufactured from 3D printed continuous carbon fibre reinforced polyamide

Abstract

This paper studies the effect of several design parameters on the impact performance of fully 3D printed sandwich panels with a core cell unit inspired by the trabecular structure of the forewing of a beetle. The key finding is that the asymmetric sandwich panel, which featured a thicker face sheet at the back and a core with a variating cell wall thickness of weak-to-strong, exhibited the highest impact energy dissipation. Specifically, 98.1 J was dissipated with 6970 N of peak load. This surpassed the performance of the sandwich panel with homogeneous cell wall thickness and asymmetric face sheets, which dissipated only 72.1 J and failed at 5406 N. In general, asymmetric configurations were found to dissipate greater energy than symmetric face sheets, and for sandwich plates with homogenous cores, the configuration with the thickest back face sheet proved more resistant to damage than the opposite asymmetric configuration.