Response of clamped sandwich beams subjected to high-velocity impact by sand slugs

•We use a model experiment to study the impact of soil ejected by buried explosives.•Sandwich beams are impacted normally by slugs of dry and water-saturated sand.•Sandwich core properties are varied by changing the core orientation and height.•Sandwich beams with thick, strong cores are shown to be the optimal design.•Foam projectiles shown as alternative to replicate the impact of sand slugs.

The dynamic response of end-clamped sandwich and monolithic beams of equal areal mass subjected to loading via high-velocity slugs of dry and water-saturated sand is measured using a novel laboratory-based method. The sandwich beams comprise aluminium face sheets and an aluminium honeycomb core: the effect of sandwich core strength and beam thickness on the dynamic beam deflection is investigated by varying the orientation and height of the anisotropic aluminium honeycomb core material. High-speed imaging is used to measure the transient transverse deflection of the beams and to record the dynamic modes of deformation. The measurements show that sandwich beams with thick, strong cores are optimal and that these beams significantly outperform monolithic beams of equal mass. The water-saturated sand slugs cause significantly higher deflections compared to the dry sand slugs having the same mean slug velocity and we demonstrate that this enhanced deflection is due to the larger mass of the water-saturated slugs. Finally, we show that the impact of sand slugs is equivalent to the impact of a crushable foam projectile. The experiments using foam projectiles are significantly simpler to perform and thus represent a more convenient laboratory technique.