A new hybrid concept for sandwich structures

Sandwich structures are considered as optimal designs for carrying bending loads and can be either metal (aluminium faces and honeycomb or metal foam cores) or polymer structures (composite faces with polymer foam cores). In this paper, a new hybrid sandwich structure has been developed by combining most of the advantages of metallic and polymeric materials while avoiding some of their main disadvantages. For this new concept metal sheets are used at the outer surfaces to maximize rigidity while introducing in between lightweight cores adhesively bonded to keep the whole structure together. Furthermore, composite or wood layers may be used as intermediate layers to improve impact resistance. Potential methods for the manufacturing of this new structure are based on compression under vacuum. The results include the study of several panel configurations theoretically based on Finite element analysis and on the modified simplified equations and experimental results in the most representative cases of the study.