Materials and Design 51 (2013) 1071–1084

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Materials and Design

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Crashworthiness optimization of corrugated sandwich panels

Shujuan Hou a,b,⇑, Shuyun Zhao a,b, Lili Ren a,b, Xu Han a,b,⇑, Qing Li c
a
State Key Laboratory of Advanced Design and Manufacturing for Vehicle Body, Hunan University, Changsha, Hunan 410082, China
b
College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, Hunan 410082, China
c
School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: As a class of important lightweight structural components, sandwich panels have gained considerable
Received 27 October 2012 popularity in a range of engineering applications. The crashworthiness of sandwich structures, which sig-
Accepted 26 April 2013 nifies a key mechanical property under impact loading, is found largely related to shape and dimensional
Available online 7 May 2013
parameters, such as cell width, wall thickness, structural angle and core height. This study exemplifies
corrugated sandwich panels with trapezoidal and triangular cores to determine the relationship between
Keywords: the structural parameters and the crashworthiness under low-velocity local impact and planar impact,
Crashworthiness
further optimizing these structural parameters with the crashworthiness criteria by using multiobjective
Optimization
Sandwich panel
optimization techniques. The configurations of trapezoidal and triangular core cells are firstly optimized
Corrugated core for maximizing energy absorption. The wall thickness of sandwich panels with optimal trapezoidal core
Energy absorption shape is then optimized for crashworthiness. Finally, the crashworthiness of these two types of corru-
gated sandwich panels is compared with each other under the identical face sheet thickness and core
density and it is found that the triangular configuration has better performance.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction experimentally and numerically, which demonstrated that the rear

Sandwich structures are extensively used in aerospace, marine
and automobile industries. From a safety point of view, they could
however suffer from the impact damage caused by a number of
fairly common sources such as bird-strike, hail stone, tool drops,
debris thrown up from runways, blasted water and vehicles crush
[1,2]. The structural resistance to severe impacts is directly related
to structural integrity and safety. For this reason, it is of fundamen-
tal importance to explore the impact behaviors and optimize the
sandwich panels for better crashing performances.
Currently, experiments and finite element (FE) simulations are
the two major approaches adopted in the impact analysis. For
example, Meo et al. [2] conducted the experimental test and
numerical simulation for characterizing the low-velocity impact
behavior of a composite aircraft sandwich panel and achieved
fairly good agreement of these two methods. Aktay et al. [3] inves-
tigated the damage behavior of composite sandwich panels under
high-velocity impact in which the simulation was well correlated
to the experiment in terms of contact force history. Tilbrook
et al. [4] explored the dynamic off-plane compression of sandwich
panels with stainless steel corrugated and Y-frame cores
⇑ Corresponding authors. Address: State Key Laboratory of Advanced Design and
Manufacturing for Vehicle Body, Hunan University, Changsha, Hunan 410082,
China. Tel.: +86 731 88821809.
E-mail addresses: shujuanhou@hnu.edu.cn (S. Hou), hanxu@hnu.edu.cn (X. Han).
face stress and dynamic deformation modes could be predicted by
FE simulation with a reasonable accuracy. Dharmasena et al. [5]
studied the dynamic crushing response of a multilayered corru-
gated sandwich panels to impulsive loads incident from water by
using the experiments and 3D FE simulations. Some other
researchers also have also studied the impact responses of
composite or metallic sandwich panels under low-velocity impact
conditions, experimentally and numerically [6–8]. These studies
consistently demonstrated that force–time histories, damage
extent and dent depth could be predicted by numerical simulations
with a certain degree of modeling accuracy.
The dynamic impact behaviors of sandwich panels are closely
related to the thickness of face sheets, core density and core config-
uration, etc. The effects of these geometric parameters on the dam-
age and energy-absorption characteristics of sandwich panels have
been investigated in the past. Dear et al. [9] explored the damage
growth, deformation process and energy-absorption characteris-
tics of four different classes of honeycomb sandwich panels, which
were made of different materials and dimensions through a series
of impact tests. Zhou et al. [10] studied the damage and energy
absorption characteristics of honeycomb sandwich panels with
various sheet thickness and core densities. Othman and Barton
[11] investigated the effects of different loading conditions and
geometries on the failure initiation and propagation in sandwich
beams and panels subjected to quasi-static and impact loadings.
Atli-Veltin and Gandhi [12] analyzed the in-plane crushing and

0261-3069/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.matdes.2013.04.086
1072 S. Hou et al. / Materials and Design 51 (2013) 1071–1084
energy absorption of sandwich honeycomb panels by systemati-
cally exploring the effects of such geometric parameters as thick-
ness of face sheet, wall dimension of cell, and core depth, on
specific energy absorption (SEA). It is noted that these previous
studies were mainly focused on the failure mechanisms and dam-
age development of sandwich panels. In spite of few studies look-
ing at the effects of impact conditions and geometric parameters
on the dynamic responses of sandwich panels, there have been
very limited resports available on the optimal design for sandwich
panels with crashworthiness criteria [13].
This paper aims to investigate the effects of the key shape and
dimensional parameters on the crashing behaviors of corrugated
sandwich panels and optimize the sandwich cores with the trape-
zoidal and triangular configurations for crashworthiness criteria. It
will also compare the optimized crashworthiness of these two dif-
ferent corrugated sandwich panels, thereby providing some guides
to design of sandwich structures.
2. Correlation of numerical modeling with experimental tests
2.1. Experimental specimens
Two types of corrugated configurations with trapezoidal and
triangular cores are considered in this study. The basic form of cor-
rugated sandwich panel is depicted in Fig. 1, in which Hf1 ; Hf2 , Hc, a
and b denotes the upper face sheet thickness, lower face sheet
thickness, core height, total length and width, respectively. Two
different core cell configurations with trapezoidal and triangular
cells are illustrated in Fig. 2.
Aluminum 5052-O plates with a thickness of 0.2 mm are used
to be the upper and lower face material of the sandwich panels.
Aluminum 2024 sheet with a thickness of 1 mm were used to be
the core cell material. According to the fabrication process of spec-
imen, the trapezoidal and triangular cores were prepared by using
the self-made molds respectively. An epoxy adhesive was used to
bond the face plates and the cores for no less than 24 h under con-
stant pressure at the room temperature. The prepared specimen
with trapezoidal and triangular cores are displayed in Fig. 3,
respectively.
In the experiments, two specimens were tested for each type of
sandwich panels with an identical dimensions. For these two dif-
ferent configurations of specimens, the overall structural size was
a  b = 70 mm  80 mm. For the trapezoidal cores, L1 = 10 mm,
L2 = 10 mm and x = 90°. For the triangular cores, L = 10 mm and
x = 60°.
2.2. Experimental set-up
Compression tests were carried out at a low speed of 2 mm/min
through an upper smooth indenter in the INSTRON-5984 test ma-
chine in accordance with the ASTM: C365/C365M-11a, which pro-
vides a standard method of obtaining the flatwise compressive
strength. The specimen was placed on the lower platform as
showed in Fig. 4. The data of the force and displacement in the
b a
Hf1
Hc
Hf2
Fig. 1. The configuration of corrugated sandwich panel.
loading process were transferred from the sensor mounted in the
test machine to the computer.
2.3. Numerical modeling
In our study, the corrugated sandwich panels were also ana-
lyzed by using the explicit FE code ANSYS/LS-DYNA. Identically
to the experimental study, the face sheets and sandwich cores
were made of Al-2024 aluminum alloy and 5052-0 aluminum al-
loy, respectively. The bilinear isotropic plastic material model of -
MAT-RIGID was employed in the ANSYS/LS-DYNA program. For the
quasi-static loading process, the effect of strain rate was not con-
sidered here. The detailed material parameters are summarized
in Table 1.
Belytschko-four-node shell element [14] was used to discretize
the face sheets and the sandwich core members. The adhesive bond-
ing between the core and face sheets was assumed to be perfect. The
upper indenter was simulated by using eight-node solid elements,
and the lower platform was defined to be rigid [15]. Parameters of
rigid material are also shown in Table 1. An automatic surface-
to-surface contact was defined between the upper indenter and
the sandwich panel. Meanwhile, an automatic single surface contact
was considered to simulate self-contact of core sheets during defor-
mation. An automatic one-way surface-to-surface contact was
defined between the face sheets and core members.
It was understood that use of the same speed (2 mm/min) as in
the experiments would result in prohibitively long computational
time, while the quasi-static loading process could be simulated
sufficiently well through a uniformly slow motion of the upper in-
denter [16]. For this reason, a speed of 1 m/s was adopted in the
simulation. As a result, the FE models of these two corrugated
sandwich panels are shown in Fig. 5.
2.4. Comparisons of experimental and numerical results
2.4.1. Load–displacement curves
Fig. 6 plots the experimental and modeling results of load–dis-
placement curves of the two corrugated sandwich panels, respec-
tively. From Fig. 6, we can see that despite some difference, the
simulation curves correlate to the experimental curves reasonably
well. It is noted that the load–displacement curves exhibit three
clear characteristic stages, namely elastic deformation, compres-
sion-shear coupled progressive buckling and densification, which
is the same as the experimental results in Ref. [17] and as the
numerical results in Ref. [13]. In the elastic stage, the sandwich pa-
nel was compressed vertically with slight core damage. When
loaded up to a peak value elastically, the buckling of core led to
load drop. As the core sheets were further squeezed to contact with
each other, the core member started densification.
In the experimental process, the loading condition was com-
pletely the same as the simulation process and there was no
pre-loading imposed. In the preparation of specimen, an epoxy
structural adhesive was used to combine the face plates with the
cores, which followed the same procedure as the industrial speci-
fication. The adhesive combination was however not very firm on
the edge of the corrugated sandwich panels, especially for the tri-
anglular configurations, in which there existed some form of
abscission between the face plates and the cores when the impact
loading was imposed, and then, the cores slipped out of the edge of
the structure, as shown in Fig. 7b. That is why the densification
time appears to be delayed in the experiments, making the curves
shift toward right, as shown in Fig. 6. Except for this region, the
numerical curves correlated to the experimental curves fairly well,
which validated that the FE simulation is applicable to the subse-
quent design optimization for these two corrugated sandwich
panels.
 S. Hou et al. / Materials and Design 51 (2013) 1071–1084 1073

L2

t
t L
L1

ω ω

(a) trapezoidal core cell (b) triangular core cell

Fig. 2. The shapes of trapezoidal and triangular core cell.

Fig. 3. Specimen of corrugated sandwich panels.

the FE models can be effectively used for the crashworthiness

design.
From Fig. 7b, we can see that a de-bonding occurs in the edge of
the core and the lower face sheet in the triangle specimen. This is
because the adhesive area is relatively small and the bonding
strength appears inappropriate for the triangular cores. However,
the numerical simulations employed the common node to model
the connection between the face plates and the cores, which did
not model the details of adhesive layer, thereby failing to capture
the de-bonding. This also elucidates why the densification ap-
peared later in the experiments than in the simulations as in the
load–displacement curves of Fig. 6.

3. Surrogate modeling techniques

Fig. 4. Experiment set-up of quasi-static loading. The surrogate model method has proven fairly effective to re-
late the crushing responses to design variables for optimization
problems involving highly nonlinear mechanics, in which as expli-
cit relation may not be easily to establish mathematically (if not
Table 1 impossible) [18–25]. It fits a surrogate function to the true struc-
The parameters of the materials.
tural responses generated from finite element analysis (FEA) at a
Property Face sheet Al-2024 Core 5052-O Indenter rigid limited number of sampling points in the design space. The surro-
aluminum alloy aluminum alloy material gate model can be used for structural optimization after verifying
q (kg/m3) 2700.00 2685.00 7830.00 the modeling accuracy.
E (GPa) 72.40 69.60 210.00
ET (GPa) 28.00 2.50
ry (MPa) 75.80 65.50 3.1. Design of experiment (DoE)
m 0.33 0.33 0.30
There are many different DoE methods available, such as facto-
rial design, optimal Latin Hypercube and central composite design
[26,27]. The full factorial design and the Optimal Latin Hypercube
2.4.2. Deformation process Sampling (OLHS) techniques have proven effective in our previous
Comparison of the deformation processes of these two corru- studies and will be used in this paper for different problems,
gated sandwich panels is shown in Fig. 7. From Fig. 7, it is clear that respectively.
the core structure mainly underwent the buckling deformation. By The rn factorial design generates a mesh of sampling points (an
comparing the numerical with the experimental snapshots, one n-dimensional hypercube) consisting of r points spaced regularly
can see that the deformation processes and patterns were fairly in each variable interval. To create an approximation of order r,
similar in these two sandwich panels. This further confirmed that at least (r + 1)n factorial designs are needed [26]. Therefore, the full
1074 S. Hou et al. / Materials and Design 51 (2013) 1071–1084

Fig. 5. The finite element models of the corrugated sandwich panels.

Fig. 6. Comparison of the load–displacement curves of experiment and simulation.

" #2
factorial design is suitable for the problem with a few design vari- X
M X
M XN
2 ðiÞ ðiÞ
ables and lower level design. Generally, the OLHS method is capa- EðaÞ ¼ e i ¼ aj uj ðx Þ  y ð3Þ
ble for capturing the higher order of nonlinearity issues with much i¼1 i¼1 j¼1

fewer design sampling points.

where ei is the error between the FEA result and RS approximation
at the ith design point. The unknown coefficients is thus obtained as
3.2. Response surface methodology (RSM)
a ¼ ð/T /Þ1 ð/T yÞ ð4Þ
Polynomial is one of the simplest yet most effective functions
for response surface (RS) method [21,27]. In this approach, the true where / is the matrix consisting of basis functions evaluated at
response function y~ðxÞ can be approximated in terms of polyno- these M sampling points. It can be expressed as
P
mial based surrogate function y~ðxÞ ¼ Nj¼1 aj uj ðxÞ and error e as 2 3
u1 ðxð1Þ Þ . . . uN ðxð1Þ Þ
X
N 6 .. .. .. 7
~ðxÞ þ e ¼
yðxÞ ¼ y aj uj ðxÞ þ e ð1Þ /¼6
4 . . .
7
5 ð5Þ
j¼1
u1 ðx Þ . . . uN ðx Þ
ðMÞ ðMÞ

where x = [x1, x2, . . . , xn]T, N represents the numbers of basis func-

tions uj(x), aj denotes the corresponding unknown coefficient.
Taking the quadratic RS as an example, the surrogate function can 3.3. Error evaluation of the RS model
be formulated in terms of the following basis functions:
In order to validate the fitting accuracy of the RS model, the rel-
1; x1 ; x2 ; . . . ; xn ; x21 ; x1 x2 ; . . . ; x1 xn ; . . . ; x2n ð2Þ ative error (RE) between FEA results and RS approximations
[18,19] can be evaluated as
In general, the selection of basis functions should ensure
an adequate accuracy and fast convergence [18,19]. In this ~ðxÞ
yðxÞ  y
paper, the polynomials with different orders were chosen RE ¼ ð6Þ
yðxÞ
for evaluating their fitting accuracy in different optimization
problems. where y(x) represents the FEA solution, y~ðxÞ denotes the RS approx-
After the true responses are obtained from FEA at the selected M imation value.
sampling points, i.e. y = [y(1), y(2), . . . , y(M)]T, the least-square tech- In addition, statistical analysis techniques of Analysis of Var-
nique can be applied to determine the unknown coefficients iance (ANOVA) are used to check the fitness of an RS model
a = [a1, a2, . . . , aN]T by minimizing the total squared errors E(a) and to identify the effects of design variables [21,26]. The typ-
which is formulated as ical statistical measures used to evaluate the fitting accuracy
 S. Hou et al. / Materials and Design 51 (2013) 1071–1084 1075

t=0min

t=2min

t=3min

t=4min

t=5min
(a) trapezoid

t=0min

t=1min

t=2min

t=3min

t=3.5min
(b) triangle
Fig. 7. Comparison of the deformation of experiment and simulation.

include F, R2, adjusted R2 ðR2adj Þ, and root mean square error X

M
SST ¼  Þ2
ðyi  y ð10Þ
(RMSE) as
i¼1

R2 ¼ 1  SSE=SST ð7Þ X
M
SSE ¼ ~ i Þ2
ðyi  y ð11Þ
M1
R2adj ¼ 1  ð1  R2 Þ ð8Þ i¼1
Mp1
sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
SSE where y is the mean value of FEA results yi.
RMSE ¼ ð9Þ Generally speaking, the larger the values of R2 and R2adj , and the
Mp1
smaller the value of RMSE, the better the RS accuracy [21,26]. In
where p is the number of non-constant terms in the RS model, SSE addition to these statistics, the accuracy of the RS model can also
and SST are the sum of squared errors and the total sum of squares, be measured by checking the relative errors between FEA results
respectively, calculated as and the RS fitting values [18,19].
1076 S. Hou et al. / Materials and Design 51 (2013) 1071–1084
Fig. 8. The flowchart of crashworthiness optimization design process.
For clarification, a flowchart is provided in Fig. 8 to depict the
procedure of DoE, RSM and FEA based crashworthiness
optimization.
4. Optimization and comparative study of the two corrugated
sandwich panels
4.1. Loading and boundary conditions for optimization design
The core densities of trapezoidal and triangular sandwich struc-
tures are formulated respectively as
2ðL1 þ L2 Þt
qc ¼ q for trapezoidal core ð12Þ
2L1 L2 sin x þ L21 sin 2x
2t
qc ¼ q for triangular core ð13Þ
L sin 2x
where q is the density of the base material of the core sheets,
L1 = Hc/sin x for trapezoidal core and L = Hc/sin x for triangular core
as in Fig. 2.
These two types of corrugated sandwich panels are designed for
the crashworthiness criteria under two loading conditions of (1)
the low-velocity local impact and (2) the planar impact as illus-
trated in Fig. 9. In the local impact, the impactor is a hemispherical-
ly-ended cylinder with a diameter of 50 mm that carries the
impact energy of 15 J (Fig. 9a), and the four sides of sandwich pan-
els were fixed. In the planar impact, the impact energy was 600 J,
and the sandwich panel was placed on a rigid floor and was im-
pacted by an upper rigid plate (Fig. 9b). The lower face sheet was
fixed so as to avoid sliding between the rigid floor and sandwich
panels.
For the local impact, the response curves and values were cap-
tured at the time when the impactor begins to rebound and the
crushing force reduces to be zero. For the planar impact, the re-
sponses were captured at the time when the sandwich core began
to be densified and the crushing force begins to increase sharply.
The face sheets and sandwich cores were made of Al-2024 alu-
minum alloy and 5052-0 aluminum alloy, respectively [6,28].
These two aluminum alloys have similar strain-hardening material
properties, and thus the bilinear, isotropic and plastic constitutive
model was used in the FE simulation [8].
The FE models were generated by ANSYS Parametric Design
Language (APDL), and the rigid floor and rigid plate in the planar
impact were defined by the internal rigid-wall feature provided
in LS-DYNA [15].
4.2. Shape optimization of trapezoidal core for sandwich panels
In the crashworthiness design of sandwich panels with trape-
zoidal core, the shape of core cell was firstly optimized for the en-
ergy-absorption criterion (i.e. internal energy IntEn). Then the
structural size of sandwich panels with the optimal trapezoidal
core cell shape was further optimized under those two different
impact loadings with different crashworthiness criteria.
4.2.1. Shape optimization of trapezoidal core cell
The thickness of face sheets Hf1 ¼ Hf2 ¼ 1 mm; Hc ¼ 10 mm and
the core density qc = 0.05q were considered to be constants in the
shape optimization of core cell. From Fig. 2a and Eq. (12), it was
known that L1 = Hc/sin x and that any of the three parameters L2,
t and x can be obtained by the other two parameters. In this case,
the base angle x and the top side length L2 of trapezoidal core cell
were selected to be the design variables with the space interval of
0.5236(30°) 6 x 6 1.5708(90°) and 3 mm 6 L2 6 9 mm. In the de-
sign ranges of x and L2, four-level full factorial design was used
for sampling. The structural responses under the two impact load-
ings are listed in Table 2, in which IntEn, Peak F and Def denotes the
internal energy, the peak crushing force and the deformation of the
upper face sheet, respectively.
As shown in Table 2, the boldface values are the maximum and
minimum values of IntEn, Peak F and Def, respectively. For the low-
velocity local impact, it is seen in Table 2 that the difference be-
tween the maximum and minimum values is relatively small for
all these three crashing responses. This indicates that the cell shape
of trapezoidal core has limited effects on the responses of sand-
wich structures under the given constant face sheets thicknesses,
core height and core density.
 S. Hou et al. / Materials and Design 51 (2013) 1071–1084 1077

Fig. 9. Impact loading conditions of corrugated sandwich panels.

Table 2 is plotted in Fig. 11. It is seen that IntEn firstly increases as x

Structural response values of sandwich panels with trapezoidal core under two increases and then decreases after the peak. It is also noted that
loadings (the boldface numbers highlight the maximum and minimum values in each
column).
IntEn decreases along as L2 increases.
Note that in the shape optimization of trapezoidal core cell, the
x L2 (mm) Case 1: local impact Case 2: planar impact single objective is considered for maximizing the energy absorp-
IntEn (J) Peak F (kN) Def (mm) IntEn (J) Peak F (kN) tion according to the constructed RS model as
30° 3.0 8.91 4.79 2.78 86.64 32.27 8
5.0 8.75 4.87 2.86 87.04 31.08 < Maximize IntEnðx; L2 Þ
>
7.0 8.82 4.91 2.89 79.70 31.34 s:t: 0:5 6 x 6 1:6 ð14Þ
9.0 8.90 4.82 2.83 69.31 29.99
>
:
3 mm 6 L2 6 9 mm
50° 3.0 8.77 5.09 3.44 215.59 74.73
5.0 8.86 5.04 3.47 209.47 71.80 By using nonlinear optimization algorithm provided in MAT-
7.0 8.95 4.99 3.41 193.21 69.03 LAB, the optimal design variables are x = 0.9482(  55°) and
9.0 9.03 4.97 3.27 172.97 53.85
L2 = 3.06 mm with the maximum energy absorption of In-
70° 3.0 8.92 5.06 3.31 192.47 129.05 tEn = 218.986 J. Note that the corresponding FEA result was
5.0 9.01 5.04 3.35 177.22 121.22
219.64 J indicating that the relative error between RSM and FEA
7.0 9.11 4.99 3.38 175.13 107.42
9.0 9.20 4.93 3.30 160.33 82.97
is 0.3% as in Eq. (6).
For the optimized trapezoidal core cell, the deformation pat-
90° 3.0 9.07 4.81 2.75 137.69 136.68
5.0 9.17 4.88 2.99 153.43 141.29
terns for the optimized core shape are displayed in Fig. 12. In the
7.0 9.22 4.89 3.08 138.59 109.90 local impact process as seen in Fig. 12a, the parts of the upper face
9.0 9.19 4.93 3.12 154.21 104.04 sheet and the sandwich core around the impacting point deform
obviously. For the planar impact process as seen in Fig. 12b, all
the sandwich core buckles uniformly and progressively until the
entire core cells are completely squeezed.
For the planar impact loading condition, the impact ended Figs. 13 and 14 plot the crushing force vs time and internal en-
when trapezoidal core structure was totally crushed. Therefore, ergy vs time curves for the two different impact loading cases.
only the two responses of IntEn, Peak F were considered under this From the comparison, it is known that the deformation patterns
loading condition. From Table 2, one can see that the IntEn and to a certain extent determine the energy-absorption and the peak
Peak F differences between the maximum and minimum values crushing force. For the low-velocity local impact load, only local
are fairly large for the planar impact case. For this reason, the cel- structure deformed, therefore the structural internal energy ab-
lular shape of trapezoidal core is considered to have rather signif- sorbed is fairly low. For the planar impact loading, all the core cells
icant effects on the structural crashworthiness of the given deformed which lead to a high internal energy absorption. Obvi-
sandwich panels. To obtain the optimum cell size of the trapezoi- ously, much bigger crushing force is needed for the latter to make
dal core, a cubic polynomial response function of IntEn was estab- the structure completely deform than for the former to make it de-
lished as shown by Eq. (A.1) in Appendix A. The relative error of form locally.
this RS function is plotted in Fig. 10. The evaluation results by From Fig. 13, it can also be seen that in the local impact loading
Eqs. (8) and (9) are R2 = 0.9935, R2adj ¼ 0:9678 and RE is between case, the crushing force increases gradually until it reaches
±6%, which is considered adequate. The RS function of IntEn vs x the peak value, and then it decreases to zero. It is noted that the

0.06
250

0.04 220

0.02 190
Relative error

IntEn /J

160
0
130
-0.02
100 L2=3mm
L2=5mm
-0.04
70 L2=7mm
L2=9mm
-0.06 40
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6
Sample points ω

Fig. 10. Relative errors of response surface function. Fig. 11. Influences of x and L2 on IntEn.
1078 S. Hou et al. / Materials and Design 51 (2013) 1071–1084

Fig. 12. Deformation patterns of trapezoidal sandwich panels.

crushing force and internal energy curves arrive at the peak values
at the same time. However, it can be seen from Fig. 14 that in the
planar impact loading case the crushing force occurs in the begin-
ning and then decreases sharply. When the sandwich core was fur-
ther deformed and started largely contacting with the upper face
sheet, the crushing force increases again to another lower peak
(from 1.2 ms to 1.4 ms). When the sandwich core beginned to com-
pletely contacting with the lower face sheet, the crushing force in-
creases sharply (from 2.4 ms), which indicates that the sandwich
core has been crushed completely (Fig. 12b).
4.2.2. Multiobjective size optimization for the trapezoidal core
4.2.2.1. Case 1: low-velocity local impact. As shown in Fig. 2, the
upper and lower face sheet thickness Hf1 ; Hf2 and the core cell wall
thickness t were selected to be the design variables in this case. The
design ranges were 0:5 mm 6 Hf1 6 2 mm, 0:5 mm 6 Hf2 6 2 mm
and 0.2 mm 6 t 6 0.8 mm, respectively. The optimized shape
parameters of x = 0.9482(  55°) and L2 = 3.06 mm were consid-
ered as the constants in this stage, then the core internal density
was 3%q 6 qc 6 12%q based on Eq. (12). Twenty-seven sample
points were selected by the OLHS method to sample the design

Fig. 13. Crushing force–time and internal energy-time results for local impact – trapezoidal sandwich panels.

Fig. 14. Crushing force–time and internal energy-time results for planar impact – trapezoidal sandwich panels.
 S. Hou et al. / Materials and Design 51 (2013) 1071–1084 1079

space. The cubic polynomial RS functions of IntEn, Peak F and Def
are presented in Eqs. A.2a, A.2b, and A.2c respectively.
The maximum relative errors of these three RS functions in Eqs.
A.2a, A.2b, and A.2c are in range of [2%, 2%] and the other error
measures in Eqs. (8)–(10) are listed in Table 3, which shows good
accuracies of these RS models.
Table 4 summarizes the results based on the single-objective
optimization problems for three different crashworthiness objec-
tives, respectively. It can be seen that the internal energy of
9.3084 J, which was generated from minimizing Defl and Peak F,
respectively, is just a slightly lower than 9.8119 J which was gen-
erated from maximizing the energy criterion of IntEnðHf1 ; Hf2 ; tÞ.
However, when the internal energy was used as the objective,
the corresponding value of Defl = 4.39 mm is much greater than
its minimum value (1.13 mm). Therefore, H f1 ¼
0:5 mm; Hf2 ¼ 2 mm and t = 0.2 mm could be considered to be an
optimal solution for the trapezoidal sandwich panel under the
low-velocity local impact. The true response values obtained by
FEA at this optimal point were 9.2992 J, 4.0259 kN and
1.1179 mm, in which the relative error was accepted.
4.2.2.2. Case 2: planar impact. As shown in Fig. 14b, the energy-
absorption of the upper and lower face sheets is almost zero for
the sandwich panel under the planar impact loading. Therefore,
the thicknesses of the upper and lower face sheets are considered
to be the constants of Hf1 ¼ 0:5 mm and Hf2 ¼ 2 mm in this design
case, which were the optimal solutions for the local impact case
(Case 1). In this case, the cell wall thickness t was considered to
be the design variable and 15 sample points were selected in the
range of 0.1 mm 6 t 6 0.8 mm (correspondingly, 1.5%q 6 qc
6 12%q). The structural responses are listed in Table 5.
From Table 5, it can be found that the maximum absorbed en-
ergy is about 590 J which is close to the impact energy of 600 J.
Note that the energy-absorption does not vary remarkably when
t P 0.55 mm, which indicates that the impact energy of 600 J has
been almost absorbed at t = 0.55 mm before the sandwich core is
completely crushed. From Table 5, It is very clear that Peak F and
IntEn both increase as t increases, when t 6 0.5 mm.
However, the crushing structures are expected to be able to ab-
sorb as much energy as possible with as low crushing force as pos-
sible for a safety consideration. Therefore, we formulated the
design problem in the multiobjective optimization framework as
8
< Maximize : IntEnðtÞ
>
Minimize : Peak FðtÞ ð15Þ
>
:
s:t: 0:1 mm 6 t 6 0:8 mm

Table 3 -20
Evaluation of fitting accuracy of 3 RS for size optimization of trapezoidal sandwich
panel under local impact.
-40
R2 R2adj RMSE

-60
-Peak F /kN

Peak F 0.9991 0.9932 0.0316

IntEn 0.9936 0.9529 0.0756
Def 0.9991 0.9933 0.0530 -80

-100
Table 4
The results of three single objective optimization problems (the boldface number in
-120
each row highlights the objective function value in the corresponding single
optimization solution).
-140
Optimization Optimal designs (mm) Response values by 0 100 200 300 400 500 600
problems RSM IntEn /J
IntEn Peak Def
(J) F (mm) Fig. 15. Pareto front of the multi-objective optimization for trapezoidal sandwich
(kN) panels under the planar impact.

Max IntEn Hf1 ¼ 0:638; Hf2 ¼ 0:722; t ¼ 0:800 9.81 4.82 4.39
Min Peak F Hf1 ¼ 0:500; Hf2 ¼ 2:000; t ¼ 0:200 9.31 4.03 1.13
Min Def Hf1 ¼ 0:500; Hf2 ¼ 2:000; t ¼ 0:200 9.31 4.023 1.13 Table 6
Structural response values of sandwich panels with triangular core (the boldface
numbers highlight the maximum and minimum values in each column).

Table 5 x Case 1: local impact Case 2: planar impact

Structural responses for the planar impact. IntEn (J) Peak F (kN) Def (mm) IntEn (J) Peak F (kN)
qc Sandwich panels with trapezoidal Sandwich panels with triangular
q% 0.5236 8.71 4.87 2.62 102.74 33.60
cores cores 0.5672 8.79 4.85 2.64 127.68 42.68
0.6109 8.95 4.75 2.79 166.50 48.55
t (mm) Peak F (kN) IntEn (J) t (mm) Peak F (kN) IntEn (J)
0.6545 8.80 4.90 2.76 194.51 53.46
1.5 0.100 24.15 24.66 0.104 22.31 18.07 0.6981 8.80 4.92 2.81 230.49 86.78
2.3 0.150 42.17 45.35 0.157 32.36 42.43 0.7418 8.87 4.83 2.80 235.98 90.18
3.0 0.200 52.12 76.03 0.209 43.52 69.04 0.7854 9.19 4.54 3.63 260.03 77.10
3.8 0.250 69.19 113.75 0.261 54.34 129.75 0.8290 8.93 4.82 2.94 253.77 87.74
4.5 0.300 82.93 165.97 0.313 69.60 202.78 0.8727 8.79 5.04 3.07 240.85 95.95
5.3 0.350 97.43 236.62 0.365 79.46 300.72 0.9163 8.88 4.86 2.93 225.62 94.78
6.0 0.400 111.85 318.21 0.417 97.51 410.52 0.9599 8.84 4.93 2.91 207.08 106.30
6.8 0.450 124.85 415.87 0.47 115.46 461.77 1.0036 8.82 4.97 2.99 200.23 123.08
7.5 0.500 138.26 534.71 0.522 130.40 574.93 1.0472 8.85 4.87 2.81 177.63 122.57
8.3 0.550 164.83 588.26 0.574 146.04 573.83 1.0908 8.85 4.88 2.73 168.43 144.99
9.0 0.600 190.38 589.79 – – – 1.1345 8.85 4.89 2.68 165.58 150.48
9.8 0.650 209.48 587.03 – – – 1.1781 8.84 4.88 2.70 157.26 144.29
10.5 0.700 226.93 589.70 – – – 1.2217 8.80 4.82 2.61 150.14 166.77
11.3 0.750 252.59 587.90 – – – 1.2654 8.84 4.78 2.42 146.19 172.43
12.0 0.800 283.03 586.37 – – – 1.3090 8.82 4.75 2.29 121.93 169.82
1080 S. Hou et al. / Materials and Design 51 (2013) 1071–1084

Fig. 16. Influence of x on IntEn and Peak F under the planar impact.

Fig. 17. Deformation patterns of triangular sandwich panels.

Fig. 18. Crushing force–time and internal energy-time results for local impact – triangular sandwich panels.

where IntEn(t) and Peak F(t) are cubic polynomial RS functions con-
structed in Eqs. (A.3a) and (A.3b). The R2 and R2adj of these two RS
models approximately equal to 1, indicating sufficient accuracies.
By using the multiobjective particle swarm optimization (MOP-
SO) algorithm as done before [29–33], the Pareto front of the opti-
mization problem defined in Eq. (15) can be obtained as shown in
Fig. 15. The designers can select the optimal point according to
their emphasis on these two different objectives.
4.3. Sandwich panels with triangular core
As shown in Fig. 2b, the triangular core cells were optimized in
this case, in which Hf1 ¼ Hf2 ¼ 1 mm, Hc = 10 mm and
a  b = 200 mm  200 mm were constants as illustrated in
Fig. 2b. The base angle x was considered to be a design variable
with the range of 0.5236(30°) 6 x 6 1.309(75°). Here, the core
density was defined as a constant of qc = 0.05q. Thus, the depen-
dent geometric parameters can be derived as L = Hc/sin x and
t ¼ q2cqsin 2x
Hc according to Eq. (13). In this case, 19 sample points
sin x
were selected in the design range of x. And the corresponding re-
sponse values of the triangular sandwich panels were obtained
from FEA under the two different impact loadings as summarized
in Table 6.
Similarly to the trapezoidal core panel, the maximum and min-
imum values of IntEn and Peak F under the local impact loading ex-
hibit no much difference. Except for x = 0.7854(45°) and
 S. Hou et al. / Materials and Design 51 (2013) 1071–1084 1081

Fig. 19. Crushing force–time and internal energy-time results for planar impact – triangular sandwich panels.

x = 1.309(75°), the values of Def at the other design points also By using the multiobjective particle swarm optimization (MOP-
show no clear difference. It can be concluded that the core cell SO) algorithm [29–32], the Pareto front of the optimization prob-
shape still has minor effect on the crashworthiness of the triangu- lem defined in Eq. (17) was obtained and shown in Fig. 20 for
lar sandwich panels under the low-velocity local impact with the the triangulare sandwich panels. The designers can select the opti-
given constant thicknesses of face sheets, core height and core den- mal point according to their emphasis on these two objective.
sity. On the contrary, the responses of the triangular sandwich pan-
els were influenced remarkably by the core cell shape under the 4.4. Comparison of the two corrugated sandwich panels
planar impact loading. Therefore, we performed the design optimi-
zation for the planar impact loading condition. From Table 6, it is 4.4.1. Low-velocity local impact
seen that the variations of IntEn and Peak F along x are not mono- As above mentioned, for the two corrugated sandwich panels,
tonic. To reflect this, the RS models of IntEn and Peak F were estab- the shape of core cell barely has much effect on the crashworthi-
lished as shown in Eqs. (A.4) and (A.4b). The accuracy measures by ness of the structures under the low-velocity local impact loading.
Eqs. (7)–(11) are R2 = 0.9930, R2adj ¼ 0:9807 and RE interval is In order to analyze the effect of trapezoidal and triangular config-
[2.94%, 3.42%] for IntEn, which satisfy the accuracy requirements. urations on crashworthiness, the optimized trapezoidal panel is
At the same time the accuracy measures for Peak F are R2 = 0.989, compared with the optimized triangular panel with the same face
R2adj ¼ 0:9673 and RE interval is [5.25%, 8.12%], which also satisfy sheet thicknesses and core density. Fig. 21 shows the comparison
the accuracy requirement. The curves of IntEn(x) and Peak F(x) are of the time histories of crushing force, internal energy and
plotted in Fig. 16. It is clear that IntEn firstly increases and then de- displacement.
creased with the increase of x. However, Peak F always increased From Fig. 21a and b, it is seen that there is a little difference
with the increase of x. In order to obtain the maximum internal between the two corrugated sandwich panels in the aspects of
energy and the corresponding optimal base angle x, the single- the peak crushing force and the energy absorption. Nevertheless,
objective optimization was defined as the displacement of triangular sandwich panel is smaller than
 that of the trapezoidal counterpart. It is thus concluded that
Maximize : IntEnðxÞ
ð16Þ the triangular core is slightly better than the trapezoidal one
s:t: 0:5 6 x 6 1:3
The optimal solution is x = 0.8023  46° with IntEn =
253.2929 J. The FEA result of IntEn is 264.156 J at the optimal angle.
The relative error between FEA and RSM is 4.11%. The deformation
patterns of the triangular sandwich panels with optimal core cell
shape under the two impact loading are shown in Fig. 17, which
is similar to the patterns of the trapezoidal sandwich panel. The
crushing force vs time and internal energy vs time curves of trian-
gular sandwich panel with optimal cell shape for the two impact
loading are given in Figs. 18 and 19, respectively.
Meanwhile, it is expected that the structures with good crash-
worthiness is able to absorb as much energy as possible with rela-
tively as low crushing force as possible. Thus, the multiobjective
optimization problem was defined as
8
< Maximize :
> IntEnðxÞ
Minimize : Peak FðxÞ ð17Þ
>
: Fig. 20. Pareto front of the multi-objective optimization for trapezoidal sandwich
s:t: 0:5 6 x 6 1:3 panels under the planar impact.
1082 S. Hou et al. / Materials and Design 51 (2013) 1071–1084

Fig. 21. Compared results of two types of sandwich panels for local impact.

180 600
Triangular Triangular
160 Trapezoidal
Trapezoidal 500
140
400
120
Peak F /kN

IntEn /J

100 300

80
200
60
100
40

20 0
0.01 0.03 0.05 0.07 0.09 0.01 0.03 0.05 0.07 0.09
ρc ρ ρc ρ
(a) Peak crushing force (b) Absorbed energy
Fig. 22. Compared results of two types of sandwich panels for planar impact.

in terms of crashing stiffness under the low-velocity local impact
loading.
4.4.2. Planar impact
The peak crushing force and energy absorption of the trian-
gular configuration under the planar impact are also summa-
rized in Table 5, when qc/q 6 8.3%. The triangular panels also
have the identical face sheet thickness of Hf1 ¼ 0:5 mm and
Hf2 ¼ 2 mm. The diagrams of structural responses vs q  ¼ qc =q
are plotted in Fig. 22 for these two different corrugated sand-
wich panels.
From Fig. 22, we can see that the peak crushing force of the tri-
angular sandwich panels is somewhat smaller than that of the
trapezoidal panels, and also the internal energy of triangular pan-
 S. Hou et al. / Materials and Design 51 (2013) 1071–1084 1083

els is higher than that of trapezoidal panels. When the relative core IntEnðHf1 ; Hf2 ; tÞ ¼ 8:3175 þ 1:0540Hf1 þ 1:3075Hf2
density q  is small, there is a little difference between the internal
þ 2:4477t  1:4787H2f1
energy of the two sandwich panels. However, the internal energy
of the triangular panels is somewhat greater than that of the trap-  1:5962Hf1 Hf2 þ 0:8579Hf1 t
ezoidal ones with the increase of q  , before the impact energy is to-
 0:3882H2f2  1:2614Hf2 t  1:3802t2
tally absorbed. Therefore, the crashworthiness of triangular
sandwich panels is better than trapezoidal sandwich panels under þ 0:4636H3f1 þ 0:2263H2f1 Hf2
the planar impact. þ 0:5091Hf1 H2f2 þ 0:07241H3f2

5. Conclusions  0:7505H2f1 t þ 1:6684Hf1 t2

 0:7051H2f2 t þ 2:2844Hf2 t2
Two corrugated sandwich panels with the trapezoidal and tri-
angular cores were optimized and comparatively studied, in which  1:7916t 3  0:08467Hf1 Hf2 t ðA:2aÞ
the explicit finite element techniques, DOE and response surface
method were utilized during the crashworthiness design proce- Peak FðHf1 ; Hf2 ; tÞ ¼ 3:2221 þ 1:2564Hf1  0:6886Hf2
dure. The experimental means were also used to validate the re- þ 2:3073t  0:02487H2f1
sults of simulation.
When the face sheets thicknesses, core height and core density þ 0:6815Hf1 Hf2  0:7258Hf1 t
were kept constant, the core cell shape has relatively small effect þ 0:02589H2f2 þ 2:4259Hf2 t
on the low-velocity local impact responses, but they have signifi-
cant influences on the planar impact responses. The optimal core  2:7636t 2  0:06240H3f1
cell shapes were obtained by using the energy absorption as the  0:05132H2f1 Hf2  0:2539Hf1 H2f2
objective function in the crashworthiness optimization. It was
found that there is a close relationship between the deformation þ 0:2405H3f2 þ 0:1117H2f1 t
process and the crushing force vs time history curve.  0:2039Hf1 t2  0:04206H2f2 t
After the trapezoidal core cell shape was optimized, the dimen-
sional sizes of the corrugated trapezoidal panel were further opti-  1:3591Hf2 t2 þ 1:2904t3
mized under the local impact loading. For the planar impact, it was þ 0:01966Hf1 Hf2 t ðA:2bÞ
found from the curves of response vs time that the Peak F and IntEn
both increase as the wall thickness t increases, and then, a multiob- Def ðHf1 ; Hf2 ; tÞ ¼ 3:1245  0:2221Hf1  3:6668Hf2
jective optimization problem was performed and the Pareto set
þ 16:2977t  0:8558H2f1 þ 1:0999Hf1 Hf2
was obtained by MOPSO, which provide engineers with a broad de-
sign solution to help them making their final decision. þ 0:6639Hf1 t þ 0:2538H2f2 þ 2:2555Hf2 t
Finally, we compared the crashworthiness of the two corru-
 25:7688t 2 þ 0:2710H3f1
gated sandwich panels and found that the crashworthiness of
sandwich panels with triangular core is slightly better than the þ 0:05765H2f1 Hf2  0:1785Hf1 H2f2
trapezoidal ones under the loading conditions considered.
þ 0:1741H3f2  0:5268H2f1 t þ 1:2777Hf1 t 2
Acknowledgments  1:0250H2f2 t þ 2:1722Hf2 t 2 þ 9:5580t3
 0:9027Hf1 Hf2 t ðA:2cÞ
The financial supports from Key Project of National Natural Sci-
ence Foundation of China (No. 11232004), National Natural Science For the size optimization of trapezoidal core cell under the pla-
Foundation of China (No. 10902036), New Century Excellent Tal- nar impact loading, the cubic polynomial response surfaces of IntEn
ents Program in University (No. NCET-12-0168) and Hunan Provin- and Peak F by 10 design sampling points are given as
cial Natural Science Foundation (No. 12JJ5003) are gratefully
acknowledged. Moreover, the Fundamental Research Funds for Peak FðtÞ ¼ 3:9657 þ 287:3679t þ 34:1139t2
the Central Universities, Hunan University are also gratefully
 79:4263t 3 ðt 6 0:5 mmÞ ðA:3aÞ
acknowledged.

IntEnðtÞ ¼ 8:0145 þ 48:9044t þ 1022:6174t 2

Appendix A
þ 1971:6707t 3 ðt 6 0:5 mmÞ ðA:3bÞ
For the shape optimization of trapezoidal core cell under the
For the shape optimization of triangular core cell under the pla-
planar impact loading, the cubic polynomial response surface mod-
nar impact loading, the polynomial response surfaces of IntEn and
el of IntEn is given as
Peak F by 19 design sampling points are given as
IntEnðx; L2 Þ ¼ 795:255 þ 2509:424x þ 51:876L2
IntEnðxÞ ¼ 8:4403  103  5:4997  104 x þ 1:3734
 2035:49x2  52:163xL2  5:57188L22
 105 x2  1:6239  105 x3 þ 9:1917  104 x4
þ 508:9x3 þ 22:372x2 L2 þ 0:834xL22
 2:0109  104 x5 ðA:4aÞ
þ 0:24L32 ðA:1Þ
For the size optimization of trapezoidal core cell under the Peak FðxÞ ¼ 147:1995  1436:3463x þ 4822:0619x2
low-velocity local impact loading, the cubic polynomial response
 6867:2387x3 þ 4652:9200x4
surfaces of IntEn, Peak F and Def by 27 design sampling points
are given as  1201:1978x5 ðA:4bÞ
1084 S. Hou et al. / Materials and Design 51 (2013) 1071–1084

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