ABSTRACT
Manufacturing a light weight structure with affordable cost without sacrificing strength has been a challenging task for designers. The 4-point bending test is required to obtain the static characteristics (deflection and stress with loading) for the sandwich structures consist of Aluminium honeycomb and foam core with composite material face sheets experimentally on the set of the specimens and numerically by using FEA (Digimat program) and compare between them. In this study, a minimum weight optimization for sandwich panels with two types of core (honeycomb and foam) is presented by using pure Matlab scripts (m. files) for honeycomb and foam core to compare between them. The weight of the sandwich panels considered is the objective function subject to required constraints based on the stiffness, face sheets failure, skin wrinkling and core shear as well as the unknown variables the thicknesses of the core tc and the face sheet tf.
