Investigation of debonding and crack kinking in foam core sandwich beams

Debond failures in structural sandwich may lead to severe reductions in load-bearing capability of the structure because of impartial transfer of shear and tensile forces between facing and core due to the lack of interfacial bonding. Analysis of interfacial bonding in sandwich specimens subjected to transverse tensile and shear forces is presented. Stress intensity factors computed based on the near-tip displacement field are related to experimental crack growth observation on the sandwich beams with aluminum skins on a wide range of PVC foam cores. Experimentally it was found that the crack tends to grow at the interface between the bondline and core as opposed to skin/bondline interface. In shear dominated fields, a pre-existing flow tended to deflect into the core rather than grow along the interface. The tendency for kinking and the direction of the kink is examined experimentally and analyzed using the finite element method.