Abstract

Sandwich beams, comprising a truss core and either solid or triangulated face-sheets, have been investment cast in an aluminium–silicon alloy and in silicon brass. The macroscopic effective stiffness and strength of the triangulated face-sheets and tetrahedral core are estimated by idealising them as pin-jointed assemblies; tests show that this approximation is adequate. Next, the collapse responses of these sandwich beams in 3-point bending are measured. Collapse is by four competing mechanisms: face-yield, face-wrinkling, indentation and core shear, with the active collapse mode dependent upon the beam geometry and yield strain of the material. Upper bound expressions for the collapse loads are given in terms of the effective properties of the faces and core of the sandwich beam; these upper bounds are in good agreement with the measured beam response, and are used to construct collapse mechanism maps with beam geometrical parameters as the axes. The maps are useful for selecting sandwich beams of minimum weight for a given structural load index. The optimisation reveals that truss core sandwich beams are significantly lighter than the competing concept of sandwich beams with a metallic foam core.