Vibration analysis of honeycomb sandwich composites filled with polyurethane foam by Taguchi Method

In this study, the effect of polyurethane foam filler, in addition to surface layer thickness and core material thickness, on vibration characteristics of sandwich structures was investigated. The manufacturing process was carried out according to the Taguchi method. The natural frequencies and damping ratios of the produced samples were determined experimentally for fixedfree boundary conditions. In addition, solid models were developed for test samples and their finite element analyses were performed with ANSYS_® to obtain their natural frequencies and mode shapes. An acceptably good agreement was found with the comparison of experimental results with the numerically obtained ones. The most effective parameters on the vibration characteristics of the sandwich structure were determined by the Taguchi method.