Blast resistance and parametric study of sandwich structure consisting of honeycomb core filled with circular metallic tubes

Hierarchical sandwich structures have been popularly investigated due to its promotion in structural stress and stiffness. A composite Honeycomb structure Filled with Circular Tubes (short as HFCT) was proposed in the previous study. In this paper, the blast resistance performances of sandwich plate filled with HFCT core (short as SP-HFCT) are investigated numerically by considering plastic dissipation energy, deflection of back face-sheet and deformation modes. The comparisons of performance between the general honeycomb sandwich plate (short as GHP) and the SP-HFCT illustrate that the composited filling mode can effectively improve blast resistant capacity by reducing the maximum deflection of the back plate and improving the ratio of plastic energy dissipated by cellular core to the total plastic energy dissipated by sandwich plate. Parametric analyses are performed to evaluate the influence of matching effect between container and filler, filling mode and blast loading on the resistance performance of SP-HFCT. The results show that a stronger honeycomb container filled with weaker circular tubes is a more favorable configuration of HFCT core. Meanwhile, by filling circular tubes into a buckling area, a considerable mass efficiency improvement with respect to deflection resistance can be obtained. With the increasing of stand-off distance, the effectiveness of SP-HFCT against blast loads will be boosted.