Composite Corrugated Core

   Sandwich structures have been used over a long time applications where the weight of the member is critical, such as packaging, civil, naval, automotive and aerospace industries due to their low mass to stiffness ratio and high impact absorption capacity. Some instances of their applications in daily life are cardboard sandwich cores used for packaging, metal corrugated roofs, hulks, automotive chassis and bumpers, fuselage and morphing wing. In nature, where mechanical design required to be optimized, sandwich structures are used such as the human skull which is made up of two layers of dense compact bone separated by a "core" of lower density material.

   A branch of sandwich structures is the composite corrugated panels consisting of two sheets called liners, which are partitioned by a trapezoidal wave shaped fluted core referred to as medium. Figure 1 depicts the composite corrugatedcore made of woven Glass fibers.

   These panels have exceedingly anisotropic behavior. They are stiff and flexible along and transverse to the corrugation direction, respectively. Composite corrugated panels have been proposed as a candidate for application in morphing wings. This is due to the fact that wing structures must be stiff so as to withstand bending due to aerodynamic forces, and flexible so as to match the most efficient form in a flight regime.

   For the designed composite corrugated core as a candidate of morphing wing, the tensile and bending deformation in the three-dimensional space is a concern for its significant influence on the aerodynamic performance of the morphing aircraft. Therefore, one of the goals of this work was to investigate the mechanical behavior of composite corrugated core as a member of sandwich panel.