Crushing strength of honeycombs with various cell wall angles

Abstract

The effects of cell wall angle on the in‐plane impact behaviours of hexagonal honeycombs are studied by finite element method simulations. The cell wall angle varies from 15 to 75° while a regular hexagonal honeycomb possesses a cell wall angle of 30°. Three different impact velocities 10, 60 and 100 m s⁻¹ are involved. The crushing strengths of honeycombs with various cell wall angles but the same density are compared. The results show that the crushing strength of honeycombs is enhanced with increasing impact velocities for both x directional impact and y directional impact. The crushing strength ratio of y directional impact to x directional impact is sensitive to cell wall angle at lower impact velocities, while it approaches 1 for various cell wall angles at a high impact velocity of 100 m s⁻¹. The cell shape has significant influence on the crushing strength of honeycombs in both x directional impact and y directional impact at low impact velocities, in which the crushing strength can be diminished to only 10% of that of the regular honeycomb. However, this influence is weakened sharply with increasing impact velocity. Comparatively, the influence of cell shape on the x directional crushing strength is more significant than that in the y direction.

Keywords:

• Honeycomb
• Impact
• Cell wall angle

The authors would like to acknowledge support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant no. 10802100 and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under grant no. 2009‐39000‐3161263.