Energy absorption of foam-filled lattice composite cylinders under lateral compressive loading

This paper reports on the energy absorption characteristics of a lattice-web reinforced composite sandwich cylinder (LRCSC) which is composed of glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) face sheets, GFRP lattice webs, polyurethane (PU) foam and ceramsite filler. Quasi-static compression experiments on the LRCSC manufactured by a vacuum assisted resin infusion process (VARIP) were performed to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed cylinders. Compared with the cylinders without lattice webs, a maximum increase in the ultimate elastic load of the lattice-web reinforced cylinders of approximately 928% can be obtained. Moreover, due to the use of ceramsite filler, the energy absorption was increased by 662%. Several numerical simulations using ANSYS/LS-DYNA were conducted to parametrically investigate the effects of the number of longitudinal lattice webs, the number of transverse lattice webs, and the thickness of the transverse lattice web and GFRP face sheet. The effectiveness and feasibility of the numerical model were verified by a series of experimental results. The numerical results demonstrated that a larger number of thicker transverse lattice webs can significantly enhance the ultimate elastic load and initial stiffness. Moreover, the ultimate elastic load and initial stiffness were hardly affected by the number of longitudinal lattice webs.