Determination of energy damping upon impact load in reinforced concrete sandwich plates with different core geometries

Under impact loads, it may be a challenge to analyze reinforced concrete (RC) sandwich plates with hollow structures in terms of crushing, punching, cracking, and crack trajectories via static and dynamic equations.In the literature, the finite element solutions were conducted after determining the behaviors of the materials according to test results.Therefore,it is required to conduct experiments to determine the behaviors of RC plates to investigate their behaviors.In this study, the behaviors of sandwich plates under impact loads were analyzed experimentally.The sandwich plates were manufactured by cutting polyester foams (PF) into hexagonal prisms, square prisms, I-type, and S-type, and installing them inside the reinforced concrete plates.The newly manufactured sandwich plates are 27% lighter than the full plate.A weight of 320 kg was dropped freely from 2.5m, and the load was implemented on the center of the plate at a velocity of 7.5 m/s.Similar implementations were also conducted for filled plates, and the maximum displacements were measured in both types of plate tests.By comparing the measurements obtained from each test,the sandwich plate with core geometry that provided the highest absorption, namely, the lowest displacement, was determined. In the analyses, the S-type core geometry demonstrated more absorption compared to other core geometries.