The effect of interface debonding on flexural behaviour of composite sandwich beams

In the current article, the behaviour of sandwich beams with and without initial core–skin debonding is studied under flexural loads through numerical and experimental procedures. Sandwich beams with three different lengths of 100, 180 and 280 mm and two types of composite skin layups of [0/90] ₂ and [45/–45] ₂ are fabricated. An initial artificial debonding is created between core and face sheets during manufacturing the flawed sandwich beams. Numerical simulations and experiments of the short- and medium-sized intact beams revealed that the dominant failure mode is foam yielding and crushing. Thus, the composite skins layup sequence has almost no effect on the failure initiation and growth of those beams. However, in the long-sized sandwich beams, the layup sequence changed the load–displacement response of the beams. Moreover, ignoring the nonlinear behaviour of the composite skins caused a remarkable deviation from the experiment. It is shown that sandwich beams with initial debonding placed in tension side had a negligible effect on the loading capacity of the beams, while those on the compression side had remarkable effects. For instance, the ultimate load of the long-sized beam decreased by 56% compared to the intact sandwich beam. Similarly, in the medium-sized beam, the core–skin debonding in the compressive side caused near 20% reduction in the loading capacity compared to the corresponding intact beam. The cohesive zone model and the extended finite element method were utilized successfully to capture crack initiation and propagation between the core–skin interfaces as well as inside the foam core. Acceptable agreement was observed between the experiment and numerical results.