ABSTRACT
Sandwich composites have ever-increasing applications, especially in aerospace, automobile, and marine structures. These composites are prone to low-velocity impact (LVI) during their manufacturing, operation, and maintenance. The LVIs can lead to significant loss of residual compressive strength and finally premature failure. Therefore, it is important to understand this phenomenon of sandwich composites so that appropriate corrective measures can be taken to improve the overall performance. This chapter provides a comprehensive review of the research works available in the literature on this topic. It includes experimental investigations and numerical modeling works and discusses their important feature and limitations along with the future scope of research in this field. This chapter provides details about the experimental investigations on measuring the compression after impact (CAI) strength of the sandwich composites, various types of damages due to impact load on them, and their mechanics of formation, evolution, and growth. This chapter also provides different test standards being developed for the CAI test of sandwich composites by different standard organizations worldwide. These test standards include the standard of specimen, fixtures, and test procedure. The readers will be stimulated to learn more on this important topic of research that has very bright potential applications.
