Structural response and energy absorption of sandwich panels with an aluminium foam core under blast loading

This paper first presents an experimental investigation into the response of square sandwich panels with an aluminium foam core under blast loading, followed by a corresponding FE simulation using LS-DYNA. In the simulation, the loading process of explosive and response of the sandwich panels have been investigated. The blast loading process includes both the explosion procedure of the charge and interaction with the panel. The simulation result shows that the deformation/failure patterns observed in the tests are well captured by the numerical model, and quantitatively a reasonable agreement has been obtained between the simulation and experiment. Finally, a parametric study has been carried out to investigate the energy absorption performance of sandwich panels.