The effect of honeycomb properties and different adhesive layers on mechanical properties of sandwich composite structures

Nowadays, materials with lightweight, high strength and improved performance are needed. Therefore, composite materials used in many engineering fields have been developed. Sandwich composites made of laminated composites, which are a sub-class of composite materials, are widely used in defense, automotive and health fields due to their properties such as insulation, damping capacity, lightness, high strength and low weight. Especially, the honeycomb sandwich structures have an important role in aviation, defense, marine, sports equipment, automotive and defense industries due to their low weight-bending ratio. In this thesis; the effects of parameters used in manufacturing of sandwich structures on the mechanical properties were examined. The sandwich composites were manufactured by autoclave method with two different adhesive layers at the same curing temperature. The effects of honeycomb height, width, geometry and two different adhesive layers on four point bending, tensile and peel test results were investigated. It was observed that the tensile and bending strengths increased as the thickness of the sandwich composite structure increased. It was also determined that the strnegth values increased when the cell width of the honeycomb was small. Honeycomb geometry and cell size were found to be more effective than the thickness of the honeycomb.