Mechanical Behavior of Bio‐Inspired Laminated MXene Reinforced GFRP Composite Core of Structural Sandwich Panels: Numerical and Experimental Study

ABSTRACT In the present study, a bio‐inspired laminated MXene reinforced glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) composite core was developed based on the microstructure of Cybistera elytra, and its mechanical properties were evaluated. To achieve this, a bottom‐up homogenization approach is developed, which includes three successive steps: an equivalent model to evaluate the effective elastic properties of the bioinspired core structure, an equivalent isotropic model to evaluate the multilayer properties, and a three‐phase micromechanical model to evaluate the effective mechanical properties of the MXene reinforced GFRP composite. First, the effective mechanical properties of the three‐phase MXene reinforced GFRP composite were evaluated based on the Mori‐Tanaka and Chamis model. Subsequently, the multilayer mechanical properties were determined based on classical lamination theory (CLT) using three‐phase elastic properties as input. After that, the effective properties of the bio‐inspired core structure were evaluated based on analytical and finite element method (FEM). Moreover, the bioinspired cored sandwich equivalent model was verified using an experimental bending study. In this regard, the bio‐inspired core structure was fabricated using additive manufacturing. Finally, a parametric study was performed to study the influence of the core number of layers, core height, aspect ratio, and weight fraction of MXene on the mechanical behavior of the bioinspired core. This study makes a significant contribution by demonstrating an integrated methodology combining analytical and numerical analysis with targeted experimental verification, which provides designers with a robust theoretical foundation to investigate the mechanical behavior of bioinspired laminated composite cores with nanoparticles as secondary reinforcement compared to a reference model.