Year

2021

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

School of Civil, Mining and Environmental Engineering

Abstract

The requirement for appropriate protective measures for critical infrastructures such as government buildings, military installations, airports and high-value assets that are at high risk of being subjected to extreme loads is becoming more important day by day due to the increasing trend of terrorist activities, accidental explosion events and vehicle crashes. There are various protective measures to improve the blast and impact protection level of structures. Among the available protective measures, the lightweight protective structures have attracted the attention of design engineers due to their high energy absorption and low aerial density. Some of the lightweight protective systems include aluminium foam core, regular cellular core and auxetic core sandwich panel systems. Recently, the auxetic core sandwich panel protective systems have attracted more attention from researchers and structural engineers due to the developments in fabrication technologies.

The auxetic core sandwich panels exhibit negative Poisson’s ratio behaviour, unlike regular cellular core sandwich panels, leading to exceptional improvements in performance characteristics such as material concentration, shear resistance, high energy absorption, indentation resistance and fracture resistance. In addition to protective structures, these exceptional properties make auxetic systems suitable for various applications such as sports and medical equipment. However, for several reasons, the understanding of the blast and impact response of auxetic core sandwich panels is lacking reliable full-scale performance data. Most of the existing investigations have been based on small-scale auxetic structures fabricated from polymeric materials using additive manufacturing techniques, which are not suitable for blast loading conditions. There is a limited number of studies on the performance of small-scale metallic auxetic structures, fabricated using laser beam melting techniques, under impact loads. The studies on the blast and impact resistance of large-scale auxetic core protective systems are currently limited to numerical simulations. Therefore, this research aims to fill the research gap by developing a new class of auxetic core sandwich panel systems and investigating the response of the protective system under realistic blast and impact loads.

FoR codes (2008)

010301 Numerical Analysis, 0905 CIVIL ENGINEERING, 090506 Structural Engineering, 091202 Composite and Hybrid Materials

Download

Share

COinS
 

Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the University of Wollongong.