Effect of core geometry on shear moduli in cellular core sandwich structures

Cellular structures are lightweight structures with appropriate stiffness properties which that can withstand directional forces. Usually these cells are in the form of a honeycomb but various cell geometries can be considered as well, for special applications. Because of the repetitive nature of the cellular array and large dimensions of the sheets in the applications as compared to the cell geometry, the core can be considered as a homogeneous but anisotropic medium .Previous studies for calculating the elasticity tensor of sandwich structures is based on the energetic homogenization method. In present study by changing in the number and positions of nodes, the number of cell walls and changing in size of representative volume elements (RVE) and also using homogenization method, the shear components of the elasticity tensor are obtained for heterogeneous geometries by assuming unconstraint core. The results show that the effect of these changes ,increase the quality of stiffness and weight reduction for some core geometries of sandwich panels that have not been evaluated yet.