Inertia effects on the progressive crushing of aluminium honeycombs under impact loading

This paper presents the test results under quasi-static and impact loadings for a series of aluminum honeycombs (3003 and 5052 alloys) of different cell sizes, showing significantly different enhancements of the crushing pressure between 3003 honeycombs and the 5052 ones. A comprehensive numerical investigation with rate insensitive constitutive laws is also performed to model the experimental results for different cell size/wall thickness/base material, which suggests that honeycomb crushing pressure enhancement under impact loading is mostly due to a structural effect. Such simulated tests provide detailed local information such as stress and strain fields (in the cell wall) during the whole crushing process of honeycombs. A larger strain (in the cell wall) under impact loading than for the quasi-static case before each successive folding of honeycombs is observed, because of the lateral inertia effect. Thus, differences of the ratios of the stress increase due to strain hardening over the yield stress between 3003 and 5052 alloys lead to the different enhancements of crushing pressure. This result illustrates that the lateral inertia effect in the successive folding of honeycombs is the main factor responsible for the enhancement of the crushing pressure under impact loading. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.