Numerical study on the blast performance of composite foam-filled re-entrant auxetic honeycomb-cored sandwich panels under air blast loading

Abstract

The study combines the re-entrant auxetic honeycomb with a foam infill to introduce the composite foam-filled re-entrant auxetic honeycomb-cored sandwich panel (FRAP) with the aim of developing a further enhanced blast protection system. The blast performance was numerically evaluated using the general-purpose finite element package ABAQUS/Explicit. This paper discusses the development and validation of the numerical model, parametric analysis, minimum weight design, behaviour and performance of the proposed sandwich panel under air blast loading. The results depict, increase in both face-sheet thickness and re-entrant auxetic honeycomb wall thickness enhances the blast performance of FRAP, the optimum face-sheet and re-entrant auxetic honeycomb wall thicknesses for the proposed most feasible FRAP configuration to be 3.4 mm and 1.9 mm respectively. The proposed FRAP exhibits 66% and 98.5% respective enhanced blast performance compared to monolithic re-entrant auxetic honeycomb-cored sandwich panel (RAHP) and monolithic foam-cored sandwich panel (MFSP), with a total mass expense of only 1.2% compared to RAHP.