FATIGUE ANALYSIS AND LIFE PREDICTION OF HONEYCOMB STRUCTURES

The use of honeycomb composite structure continues to increase rapidly due to the variety of their application, for example: satellites, aircraft, ships, automobiles, transportation rails, etc. The sandwich composites are multilayered materials made of bonding stiff, high strength skins facings to low density core material. In structural components high stiffness to weight ratios is the major benefit of the honeycomb sandwich concept. In this study a honeycomb structure is evaluated. Static behavior of sandwich are investigated for permissible load. Then a fatigue analysis is carried out to investigate for its life prediction. The objective of the project is to find number of cycles a structure sustains at a particular load. If a structure fails at early stage, efforts will be taken to increase its stiffness and strength as design parameters.A Finite element analysis of honeycomb structures is to be carried out with ANSYS Workbench as both preprocessor and post processor. The finite element analysis results compared with the experimental results.