Honeycomb–corrugation hybrid as a novel sandwich core for significantly enhanced compressive performance

•Novel lightweight sandwich constructions with aluminum honeycomb–corrugation hybrid cores are proposed.•This new design enhanced the out-of-plane compressive behavior of the hybrid cores.•Combining honeycomb with corrugation leads to dramatic increase in both compressive strength and energy absorption capacity.•Such hybrid cores exhibit structural preponderance in the low-density regime.

A novel lightweight sandwich construction with honeycomb–corrugation hybrid core is fabricated by filling the interstices of aluminum corrugations with trapezoidal aluminum honeycomb blocks. The performance of the hybrid structure under quasi-static out-of-plane uniform compression is investigated, both experimentally and theoretically. When all the interfaces in the hybrid structure are fixed using epoxy glue, the proposed structure is found to have strength and energy absorption capacity significantly greater than the sum of those of empty corrugated sandwich and honeycomb-cored sandwich. It is demonstrated that the interaction effect between honeycomb insertions and corrugated plates stabilizes buckling and changes the crushing deformation mechanisms of both constituents, leading to enhanced strength and energy absorption. Comparison with competing lightweight sandwich constructions having equal mass reveals that the proposed hybrid structure exhibits superiority in both strength and energy absorption in the low-density regime.

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