Air-blast loading is a serious threat to military and civil vehicles, buildings, containers, and cargo. Applications of sandwich-structured composites have attracted increasing interest in modern lightweight design and in the construction of dynamic loading regimes due to their high resistance against blast and ballistic impacts. The functional properties of such composites are determined by the interplay of their face sheet material and the employed core topology. The core topology is the most important parameter affecting the structural behavior of sandwich composites. Therefore, this contribution presents a thorough numerical investigation of different core topologies in sandwich-structured composites subjected to blast loading. Special emphasis is put on prismatic and lattice core topologies displaying auxetic and classical non-auxetic deformation characteristics in order to illustrate the beneficial properties of auxetic core topologies. Their dynamic responses, elastic and plastic deformations, failure mechanisms, and energy absorption capabilities are numerically analyzed and compared. The numerical studies are performed by means of the commercial finite element code ABAQUS/Explicit, including a model for structural failure.

Triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS) constitute a prominent class of cellular structures and have gained considerable attention in current research. These structures are genus‐infinite surfaces with zero mean curvature, which prevents self‐intersection. They also exhibit periodicity in all three spatial directions and exhibit enhanced multi‐functionalities due to their sophisticated topologies. For this reason, they will be discussed in this paper in terms of their energy absorption properties under impact loading. The considered TPMS structures are created in a Matlab software environment, where the unit cell and relative density can be adjusted. The samples are made of aluminum AlSi10Mg and 3D‐printed by a laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) process with the high‐precision multi‐axis 3DS DMP Flex 350 laser system. The dynamic load is applied employing a Split‐Hopkinson pressure bar, which enables dynamic compression of the samples. The evaluation of the recorded pulses allows the calculation of the energy absorption due to the sample's deformation, and thus, for two types of TPMS structures, a mass‐specific energy absorption is deduced.