Characterization of sandwich materials – Nomex-Aramid carbon fiber performances under mechanical loadings: Nonlinear FE and convergence studies

Composites are becoming materials of the future. Composite applications have become popular in the air as airframes in the aerospace industry to the deepest seas in the form of underwater pipes. A sandwich structure is a composite with cores with low-density material pinned by a stiff facing. In this article, the sandwich material used is a Nomex-Aramid honeycomb as the core and carbon fiber composite as the facing sandwich structure. The main goal of this study is to obtain the characteristics of the sandwich structure, Nomex-Aramid carbon fiber, and study the effect of core variation on the overall strength of the sandwich structure. Numerical simulation testing was carried out to determine the characteristics of the sandwich structure. The loadings carried out were mainly three-point bending, tensile, compression, and torsional tests. In addition, this study also compared the geometry of cores and several materials to study the effect of core properties on the overall strength of the materials. The authors used the finite element method with ABAQUS. A mesh convergence study was also conducted in this article. The results of the numerical simulation showed that the structure sandwich had a major drawback in the local strength caused by the size of the cells used. In addition, the geometric shape and type of the core material also affected the strength of the sandwich structure.