Investigation of Crashworthiness Characteristics of Sandwich Panels Inspired by the Mantis Shrimp Dactyl Club
Engineering Perspective, cilt.6, sa.4, ss.584-599, 2026 (Scopus)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
- Cilt numarası: 6 Sayı: 4
- Basım Tarihi: 2026
- Doi Numarası: 10.64808/engineeringperspective.1986204
- Dergi Adı: Engineering Perspective
- Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Scopus
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.584-599
- Anahtar Kelimeler: additive manufacturing, Biomimetics, crashworthiness, finite element analysis, sandwich panels
- Karadeniz Teknik Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
The growing demand for lightweight, crashworthy structures in aerospace, automotive, and protective engineering has motivated the development of sandwich panels with high stiffness-to-weight ratios and strong energy absorption. This study investigates the crashworthiness of additively manufactured polylactic acid (PLA) sandwich panels with biomimetics-based helicoidal cores. Rather than reproducing the Bouligand architecture of the mantis shrimp dactyl club as a fiber laminate, the progressive rotational principle was abstracted and applied to the walls of three-dimensional cellular cores. Square, octagonal, and circular unit-cell topologies were combined with gradual angular (10°) and orthogonal (90°) rotational arrangements, yielding six core configurations manufactured by fused deposition modeling (FDM). Drop-weight impact tests were conducted at 50 J, complemented by nonlinear explicit finite element analyses that were first validated against experiments and then extended to 100 J, including a mesh convergence study and sequence-angle variants (20° and 45°). Results show that the angular arrangement generally yields higher crash force efficiency, with the octagonal-angular core reaching the highest CFE (70.77% at 50 J), while orthogonal arrangements provide higher mean crash forces for cylindrical and octagonal cores. Increasing the layer-sequence angle from 20° to 45° raised the mean crash force by up to 15% and markedly improved resistance to face-sheet perforation, with the square-angular 45° configuration offering the best balance of efficiency and mean resistance. The findings demonstrate that sequential wall rotation is an effective multi-metric design parameter whose benefits depend on the underlying cell topology.