Blast resistance of stiffened sandwich panels with aluminum cenosphere syntactic foam

• Response of the ACSF core stiffened and unstiffened structures subjected to blast load are presented.
• The novelty lies in the use of cenosphere syntactic foam as core material in sandwich panels.
• This foam is indigenously developed at CSIR-Advanced Materials and Processes Research Institute, Bhopal, India.
• ACSF has higher yield and plateau strength than aluminum foam and is analyzed to be used as foam core under blast loading.
• Numerical results are validated with available experimental test results.

The present investigation examines the response of the aluminum cenosphere syntactic foam core stiffened and unstiffened structures subjected to blast load. The blast is applied using blast load equations available in LS-DYNA by defining the charge and standoff distance to analyze the structures under a particular blast load. The dynamic response of the sandwich structures is studied in terms of quantitative assessment, which mainly focuses on the peak central point displacement of the back-sheet (opposite to the explosion) of the sandwich structures. The analysis is carried out with an objective of understanding the effects of the foam thickness, strain rate, and the stiffener configurations on the response of sandwich structure to the blast load. The results obtained indicate that the provision of the stiffeners and foam core considerably improves the blast resistance as compared to both, the unstiffened panels with foam core and without using syntactic foam core.