Abstract
The paper presents experimental results on the mechanical behaviour for a polymer based composite sandwich panel tensile and bending tested, which uses, one by one, a cellular composite core fabricated by additive manufacturing of four different types of polymeric materials: ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene), PC (polycarbonate), PLA (polylactide) and CF (polylactide + 40% carbon fibre), with the thickness of 3 and 5 mm. This research focuses on comparative analysis of the core thickness increase effect on the structure’s strength. Experimental tests carried out on standardized test-pieces with specialized laboratory equipment, are highlighting similar mechanical behaviour and are showing also an increase of composite stiffness with the increase of core thickness, at the same time, the arrangement of the cellular lattice structure has a significant effect on the structural strength.
Keywords: composite structure; sandwich panel; cellular composite; additive manufacturing