Keywords: cellular wood material, DendroLight®, ANSYS numerical simulation, ARAMIS, equivalent stiffness.

This paper deals with the numerical simulation of the mechanical and thermal behaviour of cellular wood material, DendroLight®. The commercial computer code ANSYS is used. DendroLight® is a cellular wood material made of profiled wood boards stacked in layers perpendicular to each other and then sliced once more in plates perpendicularly to the board layers. The weight saving of such a solution is approximately 60% compared with solid wood, enablingthis type of solution to be a core structure for sandwich panels in the furniture industry. The next step is to implement DendroLight® as a core material for load bearing sandwich panels in structural engineering for applications in walls and floor panels. For this reason reliable design methods and tools are required. Complex structure and orthotropic wood mechanical behaviour makes it an inconvenient task to create a model matching the real cellular core behaviour. The only way to prove the method is to verify the numerical model with experimental test results [1]. Therefore special attention has been devoted to experimental validation of the mechanical and thermal resistance simulation model created in ANSYS.

A series of a small scale sandwich panels with a DendroLight® core has been tested in the bending and compression mode. In addition to load-displacement measurements from the load cell of a non-contact optical strain measuring system ARAMIS has also been employed to obtain the full scope of data from the strain distribution in the complex core structure. Numerically calculated displacement values for compression specimens and displacement values for bending specimens have been compared with experimental results for the same specimens. In general a good agreement between the finite element simulation and physical experiments has been reported. As a result of the dense material structure, detailed a DendroLight® model require a long computational time, therefore the parametric model in current research is elaborated employing SHELL 181 elements and only linear analysis is used. This is more a resource saving solution when compared with full scale solid elements, however still computationally inappropriate for design and analysis of the large scale panels.

Multifunctionality has become a more and more significant factor for the industry and private sector when preselecting the structural elements in civil engineering [2]. In the current research it has been demonstrated that using a simple planar numerical model it is possible to predict the thermal behaviour of the sandwich panel's with DendroLight® cellular core obtaining the sufficient level of accuracy (less than 20%), compared with results from experimental tests.

1

I. Aydincak, A. Kayran, "An approach for the evaluation of effective elastic properties of honeycomb cores by finite element analysis of sandwich panels", Journal of Sandwich Structures and Materials, 385-408, 2009. doi:10.1177/1099636209102891

2

T. Kawasaki, M. Zhang, Q. Wang, K. Komatsu, S. Kawai, "Elastic moduli and stiffness optimization in four-point bending of wood-based sandwich panel for use as structural insulated walls and floors", Journal of Wood Science, 302-310, 2006. doi:10.1007/s10086-005-0766-z

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