Determination of the material properties of sandwich beams having metal faces by vibration test

In this study, a vibration test is conducted to obtain the material properties of sandwich beams having galvanized steel faces. The main reason of making use of this test is that, favorable results cannot be obtained by the static bending test due to creep deformations for this type of sandwich beams. A low-cost MEMS type accelerometer is used for testing. Vibration tests are conducted on sandwich beam specimens and the bending rigidities are determined. The experimental results obtained are compared with the numerical results obtained using a finite element software package and it is determined that the numerical results are in very good agreement with the experimental results. The results obtained in this study shows that the use of the low cost accelerometer selected yields very accurate results. Also, it is observed that, the bending and shear rigidities calculated are in good agreement with the experimentally obtained ones in previous studies.