The University of Texas at Austin Light-weight cellular materials are widely used for packaging and for impact mitigation purposes. It is presently possible to tailor mechanical properties such as density, elastic modulus, and crushing stress and strain to the needs of particular applications. An essential requirement for this to become possible is models which can accurately predict these properties.
Honeycombs are two dimensional cellular materials with regular and periodic microstructures.
These geometric characteristics make them good candidates for systematic analyses of the mechanisms governing the compressive behavior of cellular materials. The compressive behavior of aluminum hexagonal cell honeycombs and polymeric honeycombs with circular cells have been studied through a combination of experiment and analysis. It will be shown that these characteristics are associated with inelastic buckling and a localization process in which only a narrow zone of cells experiences collapse at any given time. The collapse spreads in a steady state fashion until all the material is affected. The aluminum of the hexagonal honeycombs analyzed is elastic-plastic but relatively time independent.