Sandwich Structures for Energy Absorption Applications: A Review

It is crucial that proper engineering structures are designed as energy absorbers for high dynamic loading situations, such as accidents, blasts, or impacts. The role of such structures is to absorb the high kinetic energy as strain energy through irreversible deformation of the structure. Many types of energy absorbers were designed for different dynamic high strain rate applications. One of these structures are sandwich structures. The aim of this review paper is to provide a general review on the type of sandwich structures that have been designed as energy absorbers and their performance in crashworthiness and blast related applications. The focus is on the type of core structures being used, namely foam and architected cores. It was found from the review that sandwich structures are viable candidates for such applications not only because of their light weight, but also due to the high-energy absorption capabilities. The work presented in this review paper shows that the data from the literature on this topic are vast and do not converge to any particular sandwich structure design. This presents the potential future research direction in designing sandwich structures, which have wider application at different scales.