Preferentially Filled Foam Core Corrugated Steel Sandwich Structures for Improved Blast Performance

An experimental/numerical study was conducted to evaluate the blast performance of corrugated core steel sandwich structures with foam fillings. The core was preferentially filled with foam with the objective of creating a structure with superiror blast mitigation properties. Different core filling strategies used in the study are shown in Fig. 1(a). Core topologies were arranged as soft/hard, soft/hard/soft, hard/soft/hard and hard/soft as multilayers towards the blast loading direction. The experimental set-up is shown in figure 1(b). The blast loading was imparted using a shock tube facility and the resulting dynamic event was photographed using a high speed camera. Numerical analyses were performed using ABAQUS/EXPLICIT finite element software. The loading profile and material discretization used for numerical simulation are shown in Fig. 2. The material properties of the face sheets and the corrugations were used for standard low carbon steel material. General purpose humidity cured polyurethane foam was used for filling corrugations. The Johnson Cook material model with strain hardening and Ogden was used in Abaqus as material model for low carbon steel and PU foam, respectively. Numerical models were verified by using deflection data from high speed camera measurements. The experimental and numerical results shown in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4, respectively, illustrate that Soft/hard foam core arrangement strategies are most effective in mitigating blast and give the smallest back face displacements under shock loading.