Experiment Design in Low Velocity Impact on Aerospace Sandwich Panels with Honeycomb Core

In this article we address and design the experiment in Thermo-elasticity Center of Excellence in Mechanical department of Amirkabir University of Technology. The experiment consists of drop weight test on several structures called sandwich panels. Sandwich panels are made of a honeycomb core and two composite faces. Core material is Nomex paper in both sandwich panels and face material is Glass fiber Epoxy resin composite laminate in first specimen and Kevlar fiber Epoxy resin in the other specimen. The design procedure is performed with two important DOE processes. These methods are factorial design and 2f factorial design. In addition two parameters are of major concerns called maximum impact force and maximum force time. They will be tested in drop test apparatus with a 2.9kg weight at 80cm height. Equivalently the impact speed of the weight on the skin of sandwich panel will be approximately 4 meter per seconds. The main objective of the corresponding experiments is estimating the main factors which affect the energy absorption of the sandwich panels. We mentioned that the energy absorption in special structures such as sandwich panels is related intensively to peak impact load and loading duration. Finally we analyze the extracted data and conclude the results. Then we compare the results with SAS commercial code and conclude that they are in very good agreement.

Keywords:

Design of Experiment (DOE) , Low velocity impact , Sandwich panel , SAS , ANOVA factorial design , 2f factorial design