Effective elastic properties of flexible chiral honeycomb cores including geometrically nonlinear effects

Flexible chiral honeycomb cores generally exhibit nonlinear elastic properties in response to large geometric deformation, which are suited for the design of morphing aerospace structures. However, owing to their complex structure, it is standard to replace the actual core structure with a homogenized core material presenting reasonably equivalent elastic properties in an effort to increase the speed and efficiency of analyzing the mechanical properties of chiral honeycomb sandwich structures. As such, a convenient and efficient method is required to evaluate the effective elastic properties of flexible chiral honeycomb cores under conditions of large deformation. The present work develops an analytical expression for the effective elastic modulus based on a deformable cantilever beam under large deformation. Firstly, Euler–Bernoulli beam theory and micropolar theory are used to analyze the deformation characteristics of chiral honeycombs, and to calculate the effective elastic modulus under small deformation. On that basis, the expression for the effective elastic modulus is improved by including the stretching deformation of the chiral honeycomb structure for a unit cell under conditions of large deformation. The effective elastic moduli calculated by the respective analytical expressions are compared with the results of finite element analysis. The results indicate that the analytical expression obtained under consideration of the geometric nonlinearity is more suitable than the linear expressions for flexible chiral honeycomb cores under conditions of high strain and low elastic modulus.