Author(s)

S. McKown & R.A.W. Mines

Abstract

The sandwich beam construction under consideration consists of Alporas Aluminium foam core and continuous glass fibre reinforced polypropylene skins laid up in a cross ply form. The experimental study concerns the static and low velocity impact behaviour of sandwich beams subject to three point bend loading. The beams fail mostly by either core shear or by upper skin compression failure. Gross beam failure modes under impact were similar to the static case, however localised deformation was larger for impact loading. General discussion of experimental results will be given with a view to the 1 Introduction The core material of the sandwich beam is Alporas Aluminium foam supplied by Shinko Wire Company [1]. The skin material is a cross-ply lay-up of a glass fibre polypropylene matrix composite. This has the trade name Plytron and was sup

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