Date of Award

5-2011

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Legacy Department

Mechanical Engineering

Committee Chair/Advisor

Summers, Joshua D

Committee Member

Thompson , Lonny L

Committee Member

Joseph , Paul F

Committee Member

Ju , Jaehyung

Abstract

The effective static mechanical properties, such as the moduli of elasticity and rigidity and Poisson's ratio, of honeycomb cellular meso-structures are capable of control due to variations of their cellular geometry. While the dynamic properties of these structures are a popular topic of research, there is a lack of both consistent modeling methods and generalizations in terms of honeycomb cellular geometry. In order to fill these gaps, this study presents a standard set of methods for the finite element analysis (FEA) of honeycomb cellular materials subject to dynamic loading conditions, as well as illustrates the effects of the cellular geometry parameters on a honeycomb structure's response to non-static loads.
The first study performed compares the response of four different hexagonal honeycomb geometries to in-plane impact of varying velocities, which show different failure modes while maintaining a constant effective modulus in the loading direction.
The second section describes a newly developed design of experiments method for the simulation of honeycomb cellular materials that can efficiently gather sufficient data for the generalization of the relationships between cellular geometry and energy absorbed by the structure due to plastic deformation of the cells. This allows for the targeting of specific responses through the modification of cellular geometric parameters.
The final study discussed in this thesis discusses the simulation of models of reduced size in order to decrease the computational expense of the finite element analyses, while measuring error when compared to structures of larger numbers of cells. This allows an analyst to determine the desired trade-off between time required to perform an analysis and accuracy of the results.

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