Experimental and numerical investigation on the ultimate load carrying capacity of metal corrugated sandwich beams under four-point bending loads

In this paper, a laser-welded metal supporting sandwich beam model is tested under the condition of four-point bend loading, where the failure mode of the beam structure is obtained, and the ultimate load bearing capacity of the structure under four-point bending loads is analyzed with finite element software ANSYS. The experimental results reveal good agreement with numerical ones. Finally, the influences of the thickness of the front face, the back face, the core web, and the depth of the core of the corrugated sandwich beam on its ultimate bearing capacity are investigated in detail. Results show that when the mass of corrugated sandwich beam is equally increased to improve the ultimate bearing capacity, increasing the thickness of the front face and the depth of the core are most effective. In contrast, increasing the thickness of the front face or the core web less effective.