Critical energy release rate for facesheet/core delamination of sandwich panels.

Highlights • Establish the model to calculate critical energy release rate of sandwich panels. • Derive the equation to calculate critical energy release rate. • Calculate G IC and G IIC for facesheet/core delamination of sandwich panels. • Validate the results by comparing with previous work. Abstract Critical energy release rate is one of the basic material parameters to evaluate interfacial performance. This paper presents a method to calculate the critical energy release rate for interfacial delamination of sandwich panels. This method can be applied to the calculation of the critical energy release rate of the interface between different materials. Double Cantilever Beam (DCB) test and Cracked Sandwich Beam (CSB) test have been studied in this paper. Carbon fiber/Nomex honeycomb sandwich panels and aluminum/foam sandwich panels are used for DCB tests to determine G IC. Glass fiber/balsa sandwich panels are used for CSB tests to determine G IIC. The comparison between this paper and previous work has verified the validity of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]