Technology

Sandwich components with a lightweight honeycomb core between two skins can be found today everywhere, where weight savings
enable a cost reduction. With todays increasing degree of automation the costs for raw materials become a dominant factor in many industries. Saving raw material, material costs and resources becomes the key to realize decisive weight and cost advantages.

Sandwich materials with honeycomb cores offer excellent material properties with a minimal amount of material. This opens up an enormous weight and cost reduction potential in many fields of application, which has not been utilised in the past because of the high production costs of such materials.

The combination of materials to utilize their favorable properties is the basic idea of composites engineering. With a monolithic material, a thickness increase leads to an increase of both weight and material costs of a panel. Sandwich construction uses the fact that the core of a bending loaded panel does not carry much in-plane stresses and does not represent the surface of the panel. The core can thus be made from a different, more lightweight and/or less expensive material. Sandwich construction takes the different demands on the central layer (core) and surface layers (skins) into account. The selection and optimisation of the different material layers according to the demands enables to improve the weight and/or cost specific properties of the construction.

Detailed descriptions of the EconCore technologies and products of the ThermHex Waben GmbH products can be found on www.EconCore.com and www.ThermHex.com.