Issue 47

F. Cucinotta et alii, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 47 (2019) 367-382; DOI: 10.3221/IGF-ESIS.47.27 367 Composite sandwich impact response: experimental and numerical analysis Filippo Cucinotta, Felice Sfravara Department of Engineering, University of Messina, Italy filippo.cucinotta@unime.it, http://orcid.org/ 0000-0002-0304-4004 fsfravara@unime.it, http://orcid.org/ 0000-0003-3922-8494 Paolo Neri, Armando Razionale Department of Civil and Industrial Engineering, University of Pisa, Italy paolo.neri@dici.unipi.it, http://orcid.org/ 0000-0003-0730-0893 armando.razionale@dici.unipi.it , http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7110-3857 A BSTRACT . The use of composite materials allows to have a great flexibility in terms of mechanical and physical characteristics. One of the most used composite structure in naval field, is the sandwich, which is composed by a stacking sequence of different plies. The designer, in preliminary phase, must handle a great quantity of degree of freedom (types of materials, orientation of the fibres, position along the stack, thickness, etc.) in order to reach the best compromise between mechanical behaviour, environmental impacts and production costs. Finite Element analysis represents a useful tool in order to optimize all these parameters and to estimate the outcome of experimental tests at design stage. The main goal of this work is to develop and to validate a FE model for the simulation of a particular family of composites, widely used in naval field and, in particular, in High Speed Crafts and powerboats. The first part of the paper concerns the experimental tests on two different types of sandwich specimens. Two families of tests were conducted: four- point bending tests and impact drop tests. The second part of the paper focuses on the validation of a FE model for both experimental setups. K EYWORDS . Finite Element; Lightweight composites; Sandwich composites; Offshore powerboats; Impact tests. Citation: Cucinotta, F., Sfravara, F., Neri, N., Razionale, A., Composite sandwich impact response: experimental and numerical analysis, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 47 (2019) 367-382 . Received: 05.11.2018 Accepted: 03.12.2018 Published: 01.01.2019 Copyright: © 2019 This is an open access article under the terms of the CC-BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. I NTRODUCTION he great potentiality of the composite materials is now largely documented and exploited in each field of engineering. The importance of the composite material with respect to the other basic materials (metals, ceramics, polymers) has been presented by Ashby [1]. The importance of the no-metals materials is steadily increasing with respect to the metal ones. Usually the composite materials are used because they have a great flexibility in terms of mechanical and physical properties. Gibson [2] explains the main advantages in the use of this materials and also the theory for solving mechanical problems at design stage. The main potentiality of composite materials is the high strength-to-weight ratio and the high T