Sandwich structures have been used over a long time applications where the weight of the member is critical, such as packaging, civil, naval, automotive and aerospace industries due to their low mass to stiffness ratio and high impact absorption capacity. Some instances of their applications in daily life are cardboard sandwich cores used for packaging, metal corrugated roofs, hulks, automotive chassis and bumpers, fuselage and morphing wing. In nature, where mechanical design required to be optimized, sandwich structures are used such as the human skull which is made up of two layers of dense compact bone separated by a "core" of lower density material. Composite corrugated panels as a branch of sandwich structures have exceedingly anisotropic behavior. They are stiff and flexible along and transverse to the corrugation direction, respectively. Composite corrugated panels have been proposed as a candidate for application in morphing wings. This is due to the fact that wing structures must be stiff so as to withstand bending due to aerodynamic forces, and flexible so as to match the most efficient form in a flight regime. In addition high fatigue resistance ofcomposite corrugated panels in morphing wing application is another advantage of these structures. Tensile, hysteresis and flexural characteristics of composite corrugated laminate with and without elastomeric coatings were studied using experimental, numerical and analytical investigations. Prepreg laminates of glass fiber plain woven cloth were hand-laid by use of a heat gun to ease the creation of the panel. The corrugated panels were then manufactured by using a trapezoidal machined aluminium mold. Next, upper and lower faces of the corrugated core were coated by elastomer. In order to evaluate the mechanical characteristics of materials, a series of tension tests were performed on standard samples of composite laminates and elastomer strips. Cyclic loading behavior of elastomers in different directions was investigated. Next, the coated panels were subjected to tensile, hysteresis and three-point bending tests. For the first time, the mechanical behavior of the panel in tension and three-point bending tests was simulated. In order to model the energy dissipation due to delamination phenomenon observed in tensile tests in all members of coated corrugated core, plastic behavior was assigned to the whole geometry, not only to the corner regions. The results reveal that the mechanical behavior of this structure in tension is sensitive to the variation of core height. In addition, the behavior of composite corrugated core with and without elastomeric coatings was studied and verified in bending. Finally, the numerical results were validated by comparing them with experimental data. Good correlation, illustrating the suitability of finite element model for predicting the mechanical behavior of coated panels, was observed. Moreover, considering the non-smooth surface of corrugated panel during bending, two concepts to deal with this drawback were proposed. Furthermore, the mechanical behavior of bi-directional composite corrugated core with elastomeric coatings in tensile and bending experiments was studied numerically. Keywords :Composite corrugated core, Finite element analysis, Glass fiber, Elastomer,Three-point bending test, Tensile test, Hysteresis test
