Simulation experiments on the effective in-plane compliance of the honeycomb materials

A statistical simulation model is presented to compute the effective in-plane compliance matrices of the honeycomb materials. The present model is explained in three stages: the micromechanical model, simulation experiments under external loading and boundary conditions, and the analysis of the experiment results. In the micromechanical model, mean values of the geometrical and mechanical parameters and variations related to cell wall height and thickness are used in order to mimic the actual materials in the virtual environment. Simulation experiments are performed on these replicated materials under the assumption of linear elasticity. The effect of solution artifacts near the boundary domain is controlled by defining a measurement domain where the strain and stress fields are assumed to be constant. The simulation results for this domain are processed with transformation and the least squares minimization to obtain the effective in-plane elastic parameters. In this context, two case studies are conducted. The first case study aims at understanding the influences of the cell geometry and aforementioned variations on the linear elastic material behavior. Meanwhile, the scope of the second case study is to validate the proposed model by comparing the simulation results with the measurements conducted on Nomex® honeycomb materials by the authors.