Free vibration analysis of an aluminium honeycomb sandwich panel filled with CFRP tubes – numerical study

ABSTRACT

Aluminium honeycomb cores were predominantly used in transportation and aerospace sectors because of its outstanding structural and better mechanical properties. In the recent studies, it was found that carbon fibre-reinforced polymer composites (CFRP) tubes also can be used as a filler material to benefit out an improved mechanical behaviour. Until now, many research studies are done on CFRP-filled honeycomb to analyse the energy absorption phenomenon for axial impact loading. Always there is a demand exists to investigate structure for vibrational loading and frequencies also along with the structural loading. In this paper, numerical free-free vibration analysis has been performed for CFRP-filled honeycomb sandwich panels to analyse and predict the resonance frequencies and Eigen modes by varying the number of CFRP tubes inserted in the honeycomb and varying the honeycomb cell size. Vibrational constants like natural frequency, initial bending mode, initial lateral mode, initial torsion modes and second bending mode of CFRP-filled aluminium honeycomb were investigated.

KEYWORDS:

• Aluminium honeycomb
• CFRP
• Eigen-mode analysis
• natural frequency
• free vibration

Acknowledgments

A special gratitude to ESI-GROUP for offering us the software of Visual Mesh, Visual Crash-PAM, Virtual Performance Solution and Visual Viewer for the current research and finite element analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Annamalai K

Annamalai K is a professor in the school of mechanical and building sciences VIT university Chennai campus. He has rich teaching experience around 23 years in VIT.  His main research interests are in the areas of Fatigue and Fracture mechanics and failure analysis of engineering components. He has published over 75 research papers in international journals and conferences. He is closely associated with few companies and government institutions as adviser in design and development of engineering components and resource person for training programs.

Balaji G

Balaji G is a research scholar and pursuing his research in the Department of School of Mechanical and Building Sciences, VIT University, Chennai, India. He has a rich experience in product business development, quality assurance and technical support of automotive Computer Aided Engineering software. His research interest includes automotive vehicle crashworthiness refinement, intensifying crash energy absorption and enrichment of overall full car vehicle crash and safety performance for crash analysis.

Bhagya Nath

Bhagya Nath is a final year Master's Student of VIT University, Chennai campus, specialising in Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing. His research interest is more on vibration analysis of automotive components, design and analysis of automotive structures. His current research study is design and optimisation of plastic fixtures for Variable Frequency Drive components.

Nijin Jose

Nijin Jose is a final year master's student at VIT University, specialising in Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing. His current research study is tool wear optimisation using machine learning approach. His Research interest are more on Machine Learning,  IOT and Predictive analysis in design performance improvement and smart  mobility.