Effective Thermal/Mechanical Properties of Honeycomb Core Panels for Hot Structure Applications

The present work addresses the computation of the effective thermal and mechanical properties of a honeycomb-core sandwich panel. The panel considered has a hexagon-cell honeycomb core. An alternative method, based on the Gebhart factors within a hexagonal cell, is presented in addition to the familiar Swann-Pittman method. The advantage of the alternative method is that it incorporates different emissivities for both face sheets and honeycomb and that it can easily be extended through this method with in-plane effective conductivity values for the honeycomb core. The effective mechanical properties of the core are determined using the mechanics of materials method. The effective continuum properties are then used with classical laminate theory to construct an equivalent laminate structure to replace the honeycomb-core sandwich panel. The thermal and thermomechanical behavior of the equivalent laminate structure is compared with that of the detailed model of the honeycomb-core sandwich panel using finite element analysis. The results of the study show that the proposed equivalent laminate structure accurately captures the thermal and thermomechanical behavior of the original honeycomb-core sandwich panel with very low computational costs.