Precepts for Designing Sandwich Materials

Abstract

The demand for innovative materials has been a significant driving force in material development in a variety of industries, including automotive, structural, and biomedical. Even though a tremendous amount of research has already been conducted on metallic, polymeric, and ceramic materials, they all have distinct drawbacks when used as mono-materials. This gave rise to the development of nature-inspired sandwich-structured composite materials. The combination of strong metallic skins with soft polymeric cores provides several advantages over mono-materials in terms of weight, damping, and mechanical property tuning. With this in mind, this review focuses on the various aspects of MPM SMs (Metal/polymer/metal Sandwich Materials). The reasons for the improved qualities of MPM SMs have been discussed, as well as the numerous approaches to producing such SMs. This review shows the various possibilities of achieving such SMs in complicated forms via different shaping techniques and intends to highlight the properties of MPM SMs’ remarkable qualities, the current trend in this field, and their potential to meet the demands of many industries.