Mechanical Performances of Sandwich Structures with Carbon Fiber Reinforced Epoxy Resin Skins

Mechanical Performances of Sandwich Structures with Carbon Fiber Reinforced Epoxy Resin Skins

Sandwich materials with composite skins are strongly recommended for advanced industrial applications. With this backdrop, several tensile tests are simulated numerically in this paper for various composite beams to simplify their stiffness tensor according to the multiphase model and determine their tensile modulus Ex , and the theoretical values of Ex are approved numerically with a maximum error equal to 13.6%. Also, two sandwich structures A and B are studied, their skins are composed respectively from single and double layers of the composite beam having the greatestEx. Tensile and flexural rigidities of sandwich B are higher than those recorded by A by about 28.2% and 38.1% respectively. Moreover, a bending load is applied to a bolted single lap joint constituted from an aluminium beam assembled with sandwich B. The increase of this load implies the occurrence and the expansion of some zones with high susceptibility to failure and low fatigue life, the spread of these critical areas can be attenuated by applying bolt preload, optimising the fiber-matrix adhesion in sandwich skins and inserting an adequate washer to limit the effect of bolt bending.