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Abstract: The paper addresses the damage tolerance of sandwich structures, where the prevention and limitation of delamination failure are highly important design issues. Due to the layered composition of sandwich structures, face–core interface delamination is a commonly observed failure mode, often referred to as peeling failure. Peeling between the sandwich face sheets and the core material drastically diminishes the structural integrity of the structure. This paper presents a new peel stopper concept for sandwich structures. Its purpose is to effectively stop the development of debonding/delamination by rerouting the delamination, and to confine it to a predefined zone in the sandwich structure. The suggested design was experimentally tested for different material compositions of sandwich beams subjected to three-point bending loading. For all the tested sandwich configurations the suggested peel stopper was able to stop face–core delamination and to limit the delamination damage to restricted zones. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents a simple analytical model for the prediction of thermo-elastic deformation (spring-in) of angled composite sandwich panels. The development of the model is presented and the simplifying assumptions are clearly defined. Contributions from different mechanisms are clearly shown which gives a good understanding of the problem. The analytical model is validated against a finite element model and the validity of the simplifying assumptions is examined. The agreement between predicted spring-in from the analytical model and the finite element model is very good for the studied sandwich panels with composite skins and varying core materials. The difference in spring-in predictions is less than 0.05° for all cases studied. The simplicity of the model together with the limited number of input parameters makes it a practical tool for composite manufacturing engineers and designers. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]