Experimental investigation of the failure modes of in-plane loaded inserts in CFRP sandwich panels

Institute of Structural Mechanics and Lightweight Design, RWTH Aachen University, Wüllnerstraße 7, 52062 Aachen, Germany

^* Corresponding author: philip.richert@sla.rwth-aachen.de

Abstract

The aim of this paper is the experimental determination and investigation of the different failure modes of various insert types under inplane load in sandwich materials with CFRP face sheets and a perforated aluminum honeycomb core. In addition, also insert under an out-of-plane load are tested. In total three different kind of inserts are investigated: blind inserts, trough-the-thickness inserts and special inserts which are developed within the iBOSS research project. The inserts are tested until failure and monitored with the digital image correlation system Aramis. This test monitoring is intended to determine the first failure mode. It is shown that this works well for out-of-plane loaded insert connections and the special inserts under in-plane load. However, this does not work so well with in-plane loaded standard inserts. In further investigations, a failure of the adhesive shortly before failure of the top layers can be shown.