Experimental modal testing of a honeycomb sandwich plate

Abstract

Honeycomb structures have been widely used in several applications and industries in the past decades. Such structures have a significant role in aerospace engineering especially in building up the satellite structures. Honeycomb structures provide key benefits represented in high specific strength, high specific stiffness, and superior dimensional stability. Detailed finite element modelling of such structures is a great challenge as it involves high computational expense. Thus, equivalent modelling is mandatory. The detailed and equivalent finite element models of a honeycomb plate are introduced intensively throughout analyzing its dynamic behaviour using the modal analysis module in ANSYS workbench software. The equivalent modelling is carried out via the three-layered sandwich theory and leads to the calculation of the first four natural frequencies and the related mode shapes. An experimental modal testing of the honeycomb sandwich plate is implemented for the sake of validating the computational results. A good agreement is obtained when comparing both experimental and computational results with mean error not exceeding 5%. Finally, a parametric study is performed to relate the modal analysis results with different boundary conditions cases. The results show that the model can be a reliable basis for satellite honeycomb sandwich structures design.