Study on compression characteristics of honeycomb sandwich structure with multistage carbon fiber reinforced composites

Abstract Composite honeycomb sandwich structure shows the advantages of lightweight, high specific strength, and good energy absorption performance. It has been extensively applied to aviation, aerospace, rail transportation and other fields. In this study, a preparation method of multi‐layer honeycomb sandwich structure with the same bulk density is proposed. Various honeycomb sandwich structures with different layers were prepared and could effectively eliminate the effect of the change of bulk density on the mechanical properties of the experimental samples, which was proved by theory. The result of the experiment showed the variation law of transverse dimension of honeycomb sandwich structure. The results also suggest that with increasing the number of layers of the middle panel, both the compressive strength and the absorbed energy of the honeycomb sandwich structure increases. However, the transverse width of the honeycomb sandwich structure decreases under the restriction of the middle panel. When the strain was 0.409, the bearing capacity of two‐layer honeycomb and three‐layer honeycomb sandwich structure increased by 12.08% and 24.16%, respectively, the absorbed energy increased by 10.21% and 21.85%, respectively, and the transverse width decreased by 2.94% and 3.50%, respectively.