Evaluation of the bending stiffness on assembled light weight and high strength panel

Abstract

Honeycomb panel is widely applied into various structures such as lightweight and high stiffness panel. The glued honeycomb panel may catch fire. That's why some new high stiffness technologies have been developed. As a result of that, Truss Core Panel (TCP) has recently been developed. TCP has equivalent bending stiffness as honeycomb panel, and stronger in shear and more fire resistant than honeycomb panel. However, it is difficult in general to form TCPs compared to honeycomb panel. Therefore, multi-stage press forming process was investigated, but it cannot manufacture its structure with high aspect ratio for the limit of press forming process. The main aim of our research is to develop a new manufacturing process for Assembled Truss Core Panel (ATCP) by using bending method, suggesting the possibility to make much wider range of structures than before. In this paper, firstly we show the results of the trial product to confirm the ability of manufacturing ATCP. Then we evaluate the bending stiffness of the trial product of ATCP by measurements and FEM analysis. Finally, we conclude ATCP can be manufactured with high aspect ratio and the bending stiffness of ATCP can be estimated at the design-planning stage by FEM analysis. Some tasks on the development of ATCP will be presented by us in the near future.

Keywords

• high stiffness panel
• honeycomb panel
• truss core panel
• bending stiffness
• bending method
• fem