Experimental tests and numerical evaluation of sandwich panels with trabecular core subjected to uniaxial compression, made by Additive Manufacturing

Trabecular structures, in mesoscale, allow the production of strong and light components optimizing the strength/mass ratio. Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies offer the possibility to build thin and complex objects as the system proposed in this paper. An innovative sandwich panel with trabecular core, integrated into the aircraft wings, is presented: it works as impact absorber and as hot air anti-icing/de-icing system for aircrafts leading edges. The system leads to advantages in terms of consumptions: the combination of energetic efficiency and lightness leads to sensible reduction in fuel use and gas emission. Recent developments in Additive Manufacturing techniques have highlighted the need for robust design and analysis method for non-stochastically lattices structures. In fact, there is a strong need of efficient and affordable analysis tools with a low computational cost. In the present work, several experimental tests from compression of sandwich panels, with different cell shapes, dimension and volume fraction, have been carried out. Results were compared with numerical simulation. Both explicit and implicit code have been applied changing element type, mesh size and element order, to assess which analysis method provides the most accurate responses with the lowest computational cost.