Adhesively bonded steel corrugated core sandwich construction for marine applications

Abstract The aims of this research were to fabricate an adhesively bonded steel corrugated core sandwich construction suitable for marine applications and to investigate the performance characteristics and failure mechanisms in comparison with other methods of fabrication. Construction of steel corrugated core sandwich structures for the marine industry are shown to be viable using modern structural adhesives. These sandwich structures are also shown to be an efficient form of panelling. Using both experimental techniques and numerical analyses, the structural performance of adhesively bonded steel corrugated core sandwich beam elements was investigated in bending transverse to the corrugations, under both static and fatigue loading. The performance of these structures is shown to depend on the relative dimensions of the core and face plate materials. In fatigue loading, an adhesively bonded corrugated sand-wich demonstrated significantly improved performance over alternative fabrication methods.