A numerical simulation of metallic cylindrical sandwich shells subjected to air blast loading

the dynamic response of cylindrical sandwich shells with aluminum foam cores subjected to air blast loading was investigated numerically in this paper. according to knr theory, the nonlinear compressibility of the air and finite shock conditions were taken into account in the finite element model. numerical simulation results show that the compression strain, which plays a key role on energy absorption, increases approximately linearly with normalized impulse, and reduces with increasing relative density or the ratio of face-sheet thickness and core thickness. an increase of the impulse will delay the equalization of top and bottom face-sheet velocities of sandwich shell, but there is a maximum value in the studied bound. a limited study of weight optimization was carried out for sandwich shells with respect to the respective geometric parameters, including face-sheet thickness, core thickness and core relative density. these numerical results are of worth to theoretical prediction and engineering application of cellular metal sandwich structures.