Application of Polyurethane Foam Filled Aluminum Sandwich Structures in Blast Resistant Design

With the advancement of warfare weapons, terrorist attacks and failure of engineering structures due to impact of blast load has also frequented. Therefore, to protect the important structure and thereby human beings, scientists and engineers are proposing innovative solutions for mitigating the impact due to blast loading. Sandwich structure is one of the solutions that can be used for protecting the structure without much increase in overall weight of the structure. Therefore, present numerical analysis is performed to understand how sandwich structures filled with polyurethane (PU) foam responded as compared to bare honeycomb sandwich structure as well as equivalent weight plate. Due to the presence of foam filling in cells of honeycomb sandwich structure, the energy absorption capabilities are enhanced. The performance of PU foam filled honeycomb sandwich structure is evaluated based on peak backsheet deformation. Thus, an improved performance PU foam filled aluminum honeycomb sandwich structure is observed. Further, a parametric study is conducted considering different cell sizes (6, 12 and 19 mm), core depths (25 and 50 mm) and scaled distances. It is observed from this study that sandwich configuration with lesser cell size and higher core depth resisted the blast most effectively.