Modelling Impact Damage in Sandwich Concept Structures

Kurzfassung

The paper describes recent progress on materials modelling and numerical simulation of foreign object impact damage in fibre reinforced composite aircraft structures. The work is based on the application of finite element (FE) analysis codes to simulate damage in composite sandwich structures under impact loads. Composites ply damage models and interply delamination models have been developed and implemented in commercial explicit FE codes. The failure models and code developments are applied in the paper to composite aircraft sandwich structures to predict high velocity impact damage from hard body impactors. The role of composite skin and core in the failure process and impact energy absorption are studied for different core concepts such as polymer foam and Nomex honeycomb.