Honeycomb cores are widely used in the aerospace and automotive fields as a part of protective structures. Unfortunately, standard prismatic honeycomb cores offer a limited amount of energy absorption under lateral loads and suffer from degradation of their impact-deadening properties when their dimensional scale is increased. In this work, a multiscale study on energy absorption under quasi-static load is carried out on 3D-printed honeycomb core samples constituted by a variable section and compared to the cases of standard hexagonal honeycomb samples having the same mass and external dimensions. When doubling the dimensional scale in the case of lateral loads, the novel core geometry showed a substantial absence of specific energy absorption degradation, whereas the hexagonal core suffered from a 12.2%-degradation. Furthermore, by increasing the dimensional scale, the novel core geometry shows a delay in the densification onset. The variable-core geometry showed an average increase, in terms of energy absorption under lateral loads, of 46.8% for the regular scale and 71.4% for the double scale. Under axial loads, a 12.4%-decrease in energy absorption was observed for the samples with novel geometry, which, nevertheless, showed a relatively constant profile of reaction force under compression: this property could potentially allow it to avoid pre-crushing.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.