Simulation of the forming process for curved composite sandwich panels

For affordable high-volume manufacture of sandwich panels with complex curvature and varying thickness, fabric skins and a core structure are simultaneously press-formed using a set of matched tools. A finite-element-based process simulation was developed, which takes into account shearing of the reinforcement skins, multi-axial deformation of the core structure, and friction at the interfaces. Meso-scale sandwich models, based on measured...