Investigation and Experiment Design in Low Velocity Impact on Aerospace Sandwich Panels with Honeycomb Core

In this article we address and design the experiment in Thermo-elasticity Center of Excellence in Mechanicaldepartment of Amirkabir University of Technology. The experiment consists of drop weight test on several structurescalled sandwich panels. Sandwich panels are made of a honeycomb core and two composite faces. Core material isNomex paper in both sandwich panels and face material is Glass fiber Epoxy resin composite laminate in firstspecimen and Kevlar fiber Epoxy resin in the other specimen. The design procedure is performed with two importantDOE processes. These methods are factorial design and 2f factorial design. In addition two parameters are of majorconcerns called maximum impact force and maximum force time.They will be tested in drop test apparatus with a 2.9kg weight at 80cm height. Equivalently the impact speed of theweight on the skin of sandwich panel will be approximately 4 meter per seconds.The main objective of the corresponding experiments is estimating the main factors which affect the energy absorptionof the sandwich panels. We mentioned that the energy absorption in special structures such as sandwich panels isrelated intensively to peak impact load and loading duration. Finally we analyze the extracted data and conclude theresults. Then we compare the results with SAS commercial code and conclude that they are in very good agreement