Features of Guided Waves Propagating in a Honeycomb Sandwich Structure

Abstract Honeycomb sandwich structures (HSSs) are well-known for their very high specific strength, and are widely used for aeronautical and aerospace industrial applications. Due to their special usage and high cost, non-destructive evaluation (NDE) of HSS plays an important role in the industry. NDE using guided waves, as one of the potential method of NDE, is getting more attention for its economical efficiency. However, due to the complexity of the HSS, very little theoretical work has been done on determining the features of waves propagating in HSS structure especially in a wide frequency range. This research focuses on using a homogenized layer model for the HSS, studying how the material properties affect the features of the guided waves. By using the global matrix method, features including the phase velocities and group velocities of different modes are computed. The effects of different material properties are evaluated and compared. The results show that the material properties of the face sheets are most influential for gudied wave features. These findings open up the possibility of bypassing the complexity of the core to analyze the guided waves propagating in a honeycomb sandwich structure.