New peel stopper concept for sandwich structures

The paper addresses the damage tolerance of sandwich structures, where the prevention and limitation of delamination failure are highly important design issues. Due to the layered composition of sandwich structures, face–core interface delamination is a commonly observed failure mode, often referred to as peeling failure. Peeling between the sandwich face sheets and the core material drastically diminishes the structural integrity of the structure. This paper presents a new peel stopper concept for sandwich structures. Its purpose is to effectively stop the development of debonding/delamination by rerouting the delamination, and to confine it to a predefined zone in the sandwich structure. The suggested design was experimentally tested for different material compositions of sandwich beams subjected to three-point bending loading. For all the tested sandwich configurations the suggested peel stopper was able to stop face–core delamination and to limit the delamination damage to restricted zones.