In the past few decades, Composite Sandwich Panel (CSP) technology significantly influenced the design and manufacturing of high performance structures. Although using CSP increases the reliability of structure, the important concern is to understand the complex deformation and damage evolution process. This study is focused on the mechanical behaviour of CSP under flexural loading condition. A setup of three-point bending test is prepared using three support span of 40, 60 and 80 mm. The loading was controlled by three different displacement rates of 1, 10 and 100 mm per minute to examine the effects of strain-rate on bending behaviour of CSP material. The beam span significantly affects the flexural stiffness of CSP panel. The load-deflection response of the panel shows two different portions, that representing equivalent elastic and plastic regions in both the core and facesheets components of CSP. The non-combustible mineral-filled core appears to be nonlinear in the elastic region, at high loading rate. Consequently the failure occurs as the core/facesheets interface suffers debonding.

Ratcheting failure of materials and structures subjected to low cycle fatigue in the presence of significant mean stress is of great interest to researchers. In this experimental and numerical study, the response of 316L stainless steel samples was observed in symmetric strain control uniaxial test followed by post-stabilized monotonic test, uniaxial and biaxial ratcheting tests, in order to determine the Chaboche model parameters and to evaluate ratcheting prediction using finite element analysis. The critical elastic limit was initially obtained from incremental uniaxial cyclic tests. The Chaboche parameters were subsequently extracted from experimental hysteresis and post-stabilized monotonic stress plastic-strain curves using two optimization technics, namely, the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA). The two optimization methods were compared for efficiency, in terms of time and accuracy. The PSO method presented higher efficient results and was subsequently used to derive the parameters from hysteresis and post-stabilized monotonic curves. Different values (by definition) of elastic limit were also used. The Finite Element commercial software ANSYS was utilized with the Chaboche model to predict the uniaxial and biaxial ratcheting behavior of 316L stainless steel pipe. The comparison between experimental and the numerical simulation demonstrates that adopting post-stabilized monotonic curve rather than hysteresis curve and with accurate elastic limit obtained from incremental loading test improves ratcheting prediction significantly.