Advances in 3D Printing Meta-Sandwich Structures

Dear Colleagues,

Lightweight sandwich structures are currently extensively used in aerospace, marine, automobile, windmill and building industrial sectors, mainly due to their excellent multifunctional properties such as their high flexural stiffness, thermal insulation and high energy-absorption capabilities. Sandwich structures consist of three components: two thin solid-face-sheets with high flexural stiffness at top and bottom surfaces separated by a relatively thick lightweight core. The lightweight core connects the face-sheets with a little increase in weight, providing a high bending and buckling resistance and excellent shear stiffness and energy absorption capability. Optimized lightweight sandwich structures are made of architected cellular cores, which carry transverse shear and compression loads, and solid face-sheets which carry in-plane load and flexure. With concerns regarding limited energy and material resources, lightweight meta-Sandwich structures are of growing interest since they can simultaneously reduce the weight of structural elements and satisfy multiple functionalities. Recent advances in manufacturing, e.g., additive manufacturing and laser cutting, have enabled the manufacture of architected cellular cores of free-form two-dimensional and three-dimensional (3D) topologies, which are impossible to fabricate by conventional manufacturing processes of sandwich structures. This Special Issue welcomes works exploring the design, analysis, manufacturing and testing of additively manufactured meta-sandwich strcutures (with 3D architected core topologies) made out of ceramics, glasses, polymers (plastics), and biological materials, silica, carbon materials, metals and metallic alloys, and composites.

Dr. Hamidreza Yazdani Sarvestani
Guest Editor

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• architected meta-sandwich structures
• 3D printing
• metamaterials
• cellular cores
• energy absorption