Modeling of honeycombs with laminated composite cell walls

Honeycombs are versatile structures. They have been widely employed in industries where the characteristics of high stiffness, high buckling resistance, large shock absorption and light weight are required. To explore the potential of honeycombs in various mechanical applications, this paper proposes a novel honeycomb with composite laminate cell walls in order to provide wider selection of constituent materials, improved specific stiffness and distinct cell wall surfaces. Analytical homogenization model of this special type of honeycombs is established by modeling the locally heterogeneous honeycomb as a homogeneous orthotropic bulk. Both full-detailed and homogenized models are built and tested using finite element analysis, and the results showed that the analytical model has excellent accuracy in property prediction at a relatively small computational cost. Parametric studies are also conducted to investigate the effect of thickness and elastic moduli of the cell wall plies on the structure's overall mechanical response. Based on the results, suggestions on property optimizations are discussed.