Plasticity of formable all-metal sandwich sheets: Virtual experiments and constitutive modeling

The mechanical behavior of a metallic sandwich sheet material composed of two flat face sheets and two bi-directionally corrugated core layers is analyzed in detail. The manufacturing of the sandwich material is simulated to obtain a detailed unit cell model which accounts for the non-uniform thickness distribution and residual stresses associated with the stamping of the core layers. Virtual experiments are performed by subjecting the unit cell model to various combinations of bi-axial in-plane loading including the special cases of uniaxial tension, uniaxial compression, equi-biaxial tension and shear. The results demonstrate that the core structure’s contribution to the in-plane load carrying capacity of the sandwich sheet material is similar to that of the face sheets. The numerical results are also used to identify the effective yield surface and hardening response of both the core layer and the face sheets. An anisotropic yield function with linear pressure dependency is proposed to approximate the equal-plastic work surfaces for the core structure and face sheets. Furthermore, a new two-surface model with non-linear interpolation based on plastic work density is presented to describe the observed combined isotropic-distortional hardening of the core structure.