Cell size effect analysis of the effective Young’s modulus of sandwich core

In this paper, different methods of predicting the effective Young’s modulus of periodic cellular materials are taken into account and their abilities on revealing the size effect of the unit cell are analyzed. The bending energy method (BEM) is proposed to compare with the homogenization method (HM) and the G-A meso-mechanics method (G-A MMM). A variety of tests are carried out for different cell configurations and discussions are fully made to show its advantage. It is proved that the HM and G-A MMM results only compared to the situation of the scale factor n → ∞ and cannot reflect the size effect of the unit cell. The BEM results can perfectly reveal the underlying relationship between the effective Young’s moduli and the cell size and they are consistent with the HM and G-A MMM results for n → ∞.