Bending properties of composite corrugated plates with different
core structures∗
Sun Hao†
School of Mechanical and Automotive Engineering
Shanghai University of Engineering Science
Shanghai
sh374984133@163.com
ABSTRACT
Robots have become the mainstream of technological development
in the world today, and how to make robots lighter has become a
major obstacle to the development of robotics. There are three main
ways for lightweight technology: one is the lightweight design of
the structure, that is, optimize the size of the components; the
second is the lightweight process, that is, the new manufacturing
process; the third is the use of lightweight materials such as
composite materials.
As a lightweight material, composite sandwich structure has been
widely used in aerospace, shipbuilding and other fields due to its
special advantages such as high rigidity, large strength-to-weight
ratio and good sound insulation performance. Therefore, the
composite sandwich structure may become a way to solve the
problem of heavy robot quality.
However, composite corrugated plates have several different core
layers: rectangular, trapezoidal, triangular and cosine and so on.
In order to achieve better lightweight effect and select the
appropriate core structure, we used ABAQUS simulation software
carried out a three-point bending experiment on several corrugated
plates with different core structure and compared their bending
performance.
In this paper, three-point bending experiments under light load and
heavy load were carried out on the corrugated plates of different
core structures. The results of two experiments show that the
corrugated plates with rectangular core structure have better
bending performance.
This paper provides a new idea for lightweight technology and a
reference for material and structure selection.
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RICAI '19, September 20–22, 2019, Shanghai, China
© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-7298-5/19/09…$15.00
https://doi.org/10.1145/3366194.3366245
288
Zhao XiaoYu
School of Mechanical and Automotive Engineering
Shanghai University of Engineering Science
Shanghai
zhaoxiaoyu@sues.edu.cn
• General and reference~Experimentation • General and
reference~Validation • Applied computing~Computer-aided
design
KEYWORDS
robot, composite sandwich structure, bending performance,
ABAQUS
1 Introduction
With the continuous maturity of robot development, the application
of robot has been expanded from the earliest industrial fields to
medical and health care, life service, space and Marine exploration,
military and entertainment [1]. But their weight often prevents them
from performing their normal functions, and then this is where
lightweight technology comes in. Traditionally, there are three
approaches to lightweight design: material replacement, structural
optimization and advanced manufacturing processes. Sometimes it
is impossible to solve the existing problems by relying only on a
lightweight measure, so it is necessary to combine the three
lightweight methods.
Corrugated fiber boards are efficient low-cost and low weight
material widely used for the transportation, storage and distribution
of goods [2]. In addition to those virtues, there are some other good
properties, like high stiffness, strength - weight ratio and good
sound insulation, heat insulation and energy absorption. So, now it
is considered as the light-weight structure, and widely used in
manufacturing industry and other files, so it may also can be used
in robot design.
The metal corrugated core sandwich structure has the
characteristics of light weight and relatively high crushing load, and
it has broad application prospects in reducing impact/blasting load
[3]. But metallic materials have their own weakness, so it may not
be used in some areas. In recent decades, carbon fiber reinforced
resin matrix composites have been increasingly used in aerospace,
aviation, automobile, weapon and electronics industries due to their
superior properties such as high specific strength, high specific
modulus, corrosion resistance, fatigue resistance and high
designability [4]. So, in some areas, the researchers combined the
corrugated plate with the composite material to form the composite
corrugated plate, thus replacing the original metal material
corrugated plate.
The corrugated sandwich structure is a composite sandwich
structure composed of two high-strength thin-walled plates and an
intermediate lightweight corrugated core plate [5]. There are a lot of
core geometries available for corrugated panels, including cap,
triangular, trapezoidal, rectangular and other shaped cores, but it
also presents us with a dilemma-how to choose a right core
geometry for a design. In order to obtain more information about
the corrugated sandwich structure, and choose a right core structure,
we used three-point bending experiment to simulate the bending
properties of corrugated sandwich structure with four different core
layers.
The finite element program ABAQUS was used for numerical
calculation, so in ABAQUS software, three-point bending
experiment consists of three parts: squeeze head, core board and
cradle head.
According to GB/T 1456-2005, the length of the overarm(a)
should be one third or one half of the span(l), according to the date
that have been designed, the length of panel(L)is 380, and span(l)is
108, so the length of the overarm(a)is 36. The schematic diagram
of experimental set-up is shown in figure 2.

2 Experimental Design
2.1 Design of Sandwich board
The sandwich panel is composed of two upper and lower plates
with a core plate in the middle, and different core plates form Fig. 2 schematic diagram of three-point bending experiment
different corrugated plates. In order to facilitate the follow-up
three-point bending experiment, we designed the size of corrugated The material choice of composite material corrugated plate is
plate according to the required size of three-point bending carbon fiber T700/BA9916, and the basic mechanical properties of
experiment. Its specific size is shown in table 1. carbon fiber T700/BA9916 is listed in table 2 [7].
Table 1 Structural dimensions of sandwich board
Structure type Size/mm Table 2 Basic mechanical properties of carbon fiber
Rectangular panel size 380×180 T700/BA9916
Thickness of upper and 1.68
lower panel Parameter Attribute Numerical value
Height of the core layer 15 𝐸 longitudinal modulus of 114GPa
elasticity
Thickness of the core layer 2 𝐸 ,𝐸 8.61GPa
Transverse 、External
According to GB/T 1456-2005“Test method for bending modulus of elasticity,
performance of sandwich structure”, the panel shape of the sample 𝑣 ,𝑣 Poisson's ratio 0.3
𝑣 Poisson's ratio 0.45
shall be rectangular and the core thickness shall be 15mm. For
𝐺 ,𝐺 shear modulus of 1-2，1- 4.16GPa
honeycomb, corrugated and other lattice cores, the sample width
3 direction
shall be 60mm, or shall include at least 4 complete grids [6].
𝐺 shear modulus of 2-3 3.0GPa
According to the size of the designed corrugated board, the direction
dimensions of the trapezoidal core board, the triangular core board, 𝑋 Longitudinal tensile 2688MPa
the rectangular core board and the curved core board are strength
𝑋 Longitudinal 1458 MPa
respectively designed. Their structure is shown in Figure 1. compression strength
𝑌 Transverse tensile 69.5 MPa
strength
𝑌 Transverse compression 236 MPa
strength
Parameter Attribute Numerical value
𝑍 External tensile strength 55.5 MPa
𝑍 External compression 175 MPa
strength
𝑆 𝑆 shearing strength 136 MPa
𝑆 shearing strength 95.6 MPa
ρ density 1560kg/𝑚

Figure 1: Structure of different Sandwich panel

3. Finite element simulation
2.2 Design of three-point bending experiment Three - point bending simulation of corrugated sandwich plate was
carried out by ABAQUS finite element analysis software [8]. In this

289
experiment, “static，general step” is adopted, minimum
incremental step size is 0.5. The interaction of upper panel and
lower panel with core panel is defined as surface to surface
interaction. In order to improve the calculation efficiency, we bind
the core layer and the panels with “tie” constraints, and the bonded
areas have no relative motion and deformation.
To get the information about the composite corrugated plates with
different cores, two experiments were carried: out-light load and
heavy load, light load experiment is to simulate the react of
composite corrugated plates without destroy, and heavy load is to
simulate the react of composite corrugated plates under destroy.
3.1 Light load simulation
In light load experiment, we give the squeeze head an initial
velocity, make sure that all corrugated sandwich plates are safe and
without any destroy. Colored stress patterns of corrugated
sandwich plates are present at Fig.3, Fig.4, Fig.5, Fig.6
Fig.3 Colored stress pattern of trapezoid (light load)
Fig.4 Colored stress pattern of triangle (light load)
Fig.5 Colored stress pattern of rectangle (light load)
290
Fig.6 Colored stress pattern of trapezoid cosine (light load)
According to Tsai-Wu failure criterion, when the TSAIW value
of the unit is greater than 1, the unit fails; otherwise, when the
TSAIW value of the unit is less than 1, the unit is not invalid and
can work normally. Colored stress patterns show that the value of
all four corrugated sandwich plates are less than 1, which means
that all four corrugated plates are undamaged. From the colored
stress patterns, we can see that the rectangular corrugated plate has
lowest degree of damage, which indicates that rectangular
corrugated plate may have a better bending property. The degree of
damage of trapezoidal corrugated plate and Triangular corrugated
plate is very close, but the damage degree of cosine corrugated plate
differs greatly from other three kinds.
3.2 Heavy load simulation
Due to the special structure of the composite material, the fiber does
not break directly after breaking, and does not stop transmitting the
load, in other words, the composite material has a progressive
damage process. In light load experiment, we can only see if the
composite has been destroyed, and from Tsai-Wu failure criterion
we know the abilities of composite corrugated plates to resist
destruction, but we can't see the gradual damage that they do. So
we designed an overload experiment.
Keeping loading up until all the composite corrugated plates are
destroyed, look at the maximum value of the damage values in the
four core corrugated sheets, and add a certain value based on this
value as the heavy load value. In the heavy-load experiment, the
failure stiffness of the composite was reduced by using the Hashin
failure criterion in the Abaqus software.
Fig.7, Fig8, Fig.9, Fig.10 illustrated the degree of damage of
corrugated plates under heavy load, which show that all corrugated
plates have been destroyed. From Tsai-Wu failure criterion, we can
conclude that the damage ranking (from large to small) of four
corrugated plates is cosine corrugated plate, triangular corrugated
plate, trapezoidal corrugated plate and rectangular corrugated plate.
Their TSAIW values are 1.486,1.176, 1.158 and 1.134. Under
the same load, the damage value of rectangular core corrugated
plate is the minimum.

Fig.7 Colored stress pattern of trapezoid (heavy load)
Fig.8 Colored stress pattern of triangle (heavy load)
Fig.9 Colored stress pattern of rectangle (heavy load)
Fig.10 Colored stress pattern of cosine (heavy load)
At the same time, in order to investigate the stiffness reduction
of each corrugated plate after the damage, we used Hashin failure
in the ABAQUS software for simulation. After simulation, abstract
the reaction force and displacement of different core corrugated
plates from the historical output, and draw the respective Force-
displacement curves. Their Force-displacement are shown in
Fig.11.
291
(a) trapezoid
(b) triangle
(c) rectangle
(d) cosine
Fig. 11 Force-displacement
As is shown in Fig.11, the trend of load-displacement curves of
the four sandwich structures is similar, in the initial stage, as the
indenter continuously moves downward, the loads on the four
sandwich structures increase linearly. When the displacement
increases to a certain value, the reaction forces of the four sandwich
structures decrease rapidly, but This change does not mutate to zero,
but decreases linearly. For the sake of comparison, we have
integrated the four-shape Force-displacement map. The integration
diagram is shown in Fig.12.
 Fig.12 Integration diagram

Although they have the same trends, their load-displacement

curves differ greatly. From Fig.12, we can see that the cosine-
shaped corrugated board was the first to break, then the triangle, the
trapezoid, and finally the rectangle. When they break, the
displacement of squeeze head is 4.862mm,6.201mm,6.600mm and
7.138mm. The damage load is 29.76KN,35.52KN,34.10KN and
55.52KN.
Therefore, in the four sandwich structures, the rectangle has
better bending properties.

4. Conclusion
(1) According to the results, the bending behavior of corrugated
plates with different core shapes varies greatly, by changing core
board shape, we can improve corrugated plate’s bending property.
(2) From Tsai-Wu failure criterion and Hashin failure criterion,
we can conclude that rectangular corrugated plate has a good
bending property.

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