An Experimental and Numerical Investigation of a Novel 3D Printed Sandwich Material for Motorsport Applications

Abstract In this paper, a novel 3-D printed core material is developed to investigate the cores structures’ strength and stiffness under bending. Using powder bed fusion, Nylon PA12 structures have been produced and CFRP skin material has been applied to the 3D printed cores. The three-point bending behaviour and failure of the developed material are compared to the commonly used Al honeycomb structure. The 3D printed re-entrant structure supported the largest load among all tested cores and showed a superior stiffness in comparison to Al honeycomb cores although the latter achieved the maximum strength and stiffness to weight ratio. Additionally, a numerical 3D FEA model has been developed to investigate the re-entrant core’s nonlinear mechanical behaviour under loading. The numerical results were in a very good agreement with the experiments in terms of the loading force, plastic deformation and the failure mode.