Materials and Design 102 (2016) 238–246

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Materials and Design

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/matdes

Thermal and mechanical properties of a multifunctional composite

square honeycomb sandwich structure
Guo-Cai Yu a, Li-Jia Feng a, Lin-Zhi Wu a,b,⁎
a
Center for Composite Materials, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China
b
College of Aerospace and Civil Engineering, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: A multifunctional composite square honeycomb sandwich structure (MCHSS) is developed which provides both
Received 17 November 2015 high thermal conductivity and adequate mechanical property for a thermal management system. The out-of-
Received in revised form 12 April 2016 plane thermal conductivity of MCHSS is improved by a simple method of coating highly oriented graphite film
Accepted 15 April 2016
(HOGF), and investigated both theoretically and experimentally. There are two most efficient methods to further
Available online 19 April 2016
enhance the out-of-plane thermal conductivity of MCHSS: one is to increase the HOGF volume content, and the
Keywords:
other, to decrease the interface thermal resistance. The maximum improvement is up to approximately 26 times
Multifunctional sandwich structures for the measured out-of-plane thermal conductivity as compared with the traditional composite sandwich struc-
Composite square honeycomb tures. Results indicate that, except for high specific thermal conductivity for thermal management, MCHSS also
Highly oriented graphite film possess adequate mechanical properties for structural applications. Thus, MCHSS can be considered as a promis-
Thermal conductivity ing candidate for multifunctional structure material in the high-end heat dissipation field.
Mechanical properties © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Periodic lattice materials are considered as the most promising
multifunctional structure materials in the 21st century, and put forward
by Ashby, Evans, Fleck, Gibson, Hutchinson and Wadley, owing to their
excellent mechanical properties (specific stiffness and specific strength)
and multifunctional application potentials [1–5]. Carbon fiber rein-
forced plastic (CFRP) composite sandwich structures are more remark-
able for building ultra-lightweight multifunctional structures, especially
for spacecraft. Recently, a variety of composite lattice cores have been
fabricated and their performance evaluated [6–13]. The experimental
results have been added to the modified Ashby material property
chart [14] as shown in Fig. 1. It can be obviously seen that composite
square honeycomb sandwich panels [11] have significantly higher
compressive and shear modulus than the other sandwich panels, on
an equal mass basis. For core densities more than 100 kg/m3, composite
square honeycomb sandwich panels [11] have superior out-of-plane
compressive strength than most known materials. Only when the core
densities are less than 100 kg/m3, pyramidal truss core sandwich panels
[6] exhibit greater out-of-plane compressive strengths. Moreover,
square honeycomb structures overcome the drawback of hexagonal
honeycomb structures and show a high in-plane stretching strength
(at least for loadings along the directions of the cell walls).
However, owing to vast inner space and low thermal conductivity of
composite cores, composite sandwich structures show very low thermal
conductivity, which limits its application in the high-end heat dissipa-
tion fields such as satellite. Therefore, a multifunctional composite sand-
wich structure, possessing both the superior mechanical properties and
high thermal conductivity, is urgently needed in these fields.
In this paper, MCHSS is devised and fabricated by the CFRP compos-
ite laminate coating HOGF [15,16]. Efforts are underway to determine
the out-of-plane thermal conductivity of MCHSS and to assess its out-
of-plane compressive and shear properties, both theoretically and ex-
perimentally. Moreover, the detailed analysis is conducted to reveal
the main factors that affect the out-of-plane thermal conductivity.
2. Experimental
2.1. Materials and fabrication
The plain woven Toray T300-3 k carbon fiber epoxy prepreg with
45% resin content (a density of 1.45 g/cm3, Liso Composite Material
Technology Co. Ltd., China) is used to fabricate the square honeycomb
core due to its high specific stiffness and strength. HOGF (the density
2.1 g/cm3, in-plane thermal conductivity is up to 1500 W/mK) with a
thickness 20 μm is from Tanyuan Science and Technology Co., Ltd.,
China. The aluminum alloy (thermal conductivity of 208 W/mK) is
used as the facesheet with a thickness of 0.25 mm.
In this paper, multifunctional composite square honeycomb struc-
tures are fabricated by a slotting and assembling procedure as follow.

⁎ Corresponding author. (i) Orthogonal symmetric composite prepregs are laid up on a base
E-mail address: wlz@hit.edu.cn (L.-Z. Wu). plate and then placed in a compressive molding for curing and

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.matdes.2016.04.050
0264-1275/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
 G.-C. Yu et al. / Materials and Design 102 (2016) 238–246 239

Fig. 1. Modified Ashby material strength versus density map for engineering materials [9].

heated at 3 °C/min up to 80 °C, held for 30 min, then heated at
3 °C/min to 130 °C, for 120 min at 1.0 MPa before furnace natural-
ly cooling to ambient temperature.
(ii) Square honeycomb wall straps with the cross-slots are cut from
the composite laminates by using the diamond wire cutting ma-
chining into long strips of height H = 3l and length L = 6l + 2Δl,
where Δl is a small overhang length set at 2.0 mm, see Fig. 3A.
Cross-slots are of spacing l and of width d = c + 2t + e, where e
is a clearance of 0.1 mm to provide a sufficiently tight fit during
honeycomb assembly.
(iii) After the surface grease is cleared, the rich resin layer of compos-
ite surfaces is gradually removed by the fine sandpaper, and then
HOGF is adhered to the surface of square honeycomb wall straps.
(iv) The modified honeycomb wall straps are slot-fitted and assem-
bled to build the honeycomb core topology. The sandwich panels
are fabricated by bonding the composite core to facesheets with a
high strength adhesive (J272-A, shear strength of 48 MPa, ther-
mal conductivity of 0.3 W/mK) or a high thermal conductivity
adhesive (J-TC, thermal conductivity of 2.5 W/mK).
(ASTM C117), the heat flow meter (ASTM C518) and the transient radi-
ant step heating method (ASTM E1461), respectively. The measured ef-
fective thermal conductivities of the sandwich panel using the standard
steady-state techniques of the guarded hot plate and heat flow meter
are significantly higher than the reported radiant step heating data
and are determined to be inaccurate [17]. Therefore, the flash method
is used to measure the effective out-of-plane thermal conductivity of
MCHSS. With the measurement of the thermal diffusivity, heat capacity
and density of the specimen, the thermal conductivity of MCHSS is
calculated by the following equation:
k ¼ αρC p ð1Þ
where k is the effective thermal conductivity (W/m K), α is the effec-
tive thermal diffusivity (m2/s), ρ is the effective density (kg/m3); Cp
is the effective specific heat (J/kg K). The effective specific heat Cp is
given by:
.X
X
C i mi mi
Cp ¼ ð2Þ

According to Ref. [18,19], the out-of-plane thermal diffusivity α is as

2.2. Measurements
follows:
2.2.1. Thermal conductivity 2
Three different standard techniques measuring the effective thermal 0:1388  d
α¼ ð3Þ
conductivity of typical honeycomb core panels are the guarded hot plate t 1=2
240 G.-C. Yu et al. / Materials and Design 102 (2016) 238–246

Fig. 2. Sketch of composite square honeycomb manufacturing technique and schematic of the series-parallel thermal conduction model.

where d is the thickness of the specimen, and t1/2 is the time re-
quired for the upper surface to reach half of the maximum temper-
ature rise.
The measurement procedure of thermal conductivity is as follows.
(i) Square test specimen with size 10 mm× 10 mm× 6 mm is cut
from the center of a composite square honeycomb sandwich
panel.
(ii) A thin layer of the pyrolysis graphite is sprayed on the specimen
surface to ensure uniform emissivity on the surface for measure-
ment accuracy.
(iii) The specimen is placed within the laser flash diffusivity instru-
ment (LFA447, Netzsch) under an air atmosphere, where a
Xenon flash lamp is used to provide energy (up to 10 J) of a
short heat pulse to the front surface of the sample. The tempera-
ture rise on the back surface of the disk is recorded as a function
of time using an infra-red detector.
(iv) The out-of-plane thermal diffusivity is determined from the
temperature rise data based on the Cowen model [18].
(v) With the measurement of the thermal diffusivity, heat capacity
and density of the specimen, the thermal conductivity of MCHSS
is calculated by Eq. (1).
2.2.2. Mechanical properties
Composite square honeycomb sandwich structures are tested in
out-of-plane compression and shear at a nominal strain rate of
10−3 s−1 in accordance with ASTM standards C365 and C273. Accord-
ing to the Ref. [11], the out-of-plane compressive tests are conducted on
the reference specimen geometry comprising 6 × 6 cells with a cell as-
pect ratio H/L = 3. Square honeycomb cores are fabricated into the
cube of 64 × 64 × 30 mm3. Specimens with three relative densities are
compressed along the out-of-plane direction, and three repeated tests
are performed to gauge the variability in each case. The damage mor-
phologies are recorded using a Nikon COOLPIX P7700 camera.
Shear property is one of the most important factors characterizing
sandwich panel. Shear tests of composite square honeycomb structures
are conducted with a cell aspect ratio H/L = 1, according to the reference
[11]. The shear tests are performed by a single-lap shear set-up in accor-
dance with ASTM standard C273. The standard demands a specimen as-
pect ratio ℓ/H ≥ 12, where ℓ is the length of the specimen. The shear
response is also dependent upon the direction of loading. The load is
measured by the load cell of the test machine and used to define the
nominal shear stress, while a clip gauge mounted on the single-lap
shear test fixture is employed to measure the relative displacement
and thereby gives the applied shear strain.

Fig. 3. The out-of-plane thermal conductivity of MCHSS vs. (a) the relative density of composite honeycomb cores and (b) the HOGF volume content.
 G.-C. Yu et al. / Materials and Design 102 (2016) 238–246 241

Fig. 4. The out-of-plane thermal conductivity of MCHSS vs. HOGF volume content and interface thermal resistance.

3. Results and discussion conductivity of sandwich cores kcore can be written as

3.1. Thermal conductivity !−1

As a baseline reference, thermal conductivities of plain woven CFRP
composites are measured by an experimental instrument (LFA 447).
The in-plane quasi-isotropic thermal conductivity of the plain woven
CFRP composites is 3.6 W/mK, and the out-of-plane thermal conductiv-
ity 0.61 W/mK.
3.1.1. Honeycomb cores
The series-parallel model is developed to calculate the out-of-plane
thermal conductivity of MCHSS (Fig. 2). It is assumed that heat flow uni-
formly goes through the thickness direction. Its effective out-of-plane
thermal conductivity keff can be expressed as:
 −1
δupper δcore δlower
keff ¼ þ þ
kupper kcore klower
where δupper, δcore and δlower are the thickness ratios of the upper
facesheet, the core and the lower facesheet, respectively; kupper, kcore
and klower are the thermal conductivities of the upper facesheet, the
core and the lower facesheet, respectively. The effective thermal
1 2Ri
kcore ¼ þ ð5Þ
ρ f k f þ ρcomp kcomp Hcore
where kf and kcomp are the in-plane thermal conductivities of HOGF and
the plain woven composites, respectively; ρ f and ρcomp are the relative
density of HOGF and the plain woven composites, respectively; Hcore is
the thickness of square honeycomb cores, and Ri is the interface thermal
resistance between the facesheet and the core. We should have consid-
ered the conductivity and the thickness of the adhesive layer as inde-
pendent parameters in Eq. (5). However, it is difficult to determine
the accurate thickness of the adhesive layer since the thickness is not
uniform due to the error of cutting and assembling. Therefore, we use
the interfacial thermal resistance in Eq. (5) as a lumped parameter of
these parameters (thermal conductivity and thickness) [20]. The effec-
ð4Þ tive out-of-plane thermal conductivity keff can be expressed as:
!−1
δupper δcore δ 2R
keff ¼ þ þ lower þ i ð6Þ
kupper ρ f k f þ ρcomp kcomp klower H
where H is the thickness of square honeycomb sandwich structure.

Fig. 5. The out-of-plane thermal conductivity of MCHSS vs. (a) the interface thermal resistance and (b) the thickness of the sandwich structure.
242 G.-C. Yu et al. / Materials and Design 102 (2016) 238–246
Fig. 6. The out-of-plane thermal conductivity of MCHSS as a function of the HOGF volume
content at different interface thermal resistance.
The measured out-of-plane thermal conductivities of MCHSS are
plotted against the relative densities of composite honeycomb cores in
Fig. 3(a). As expected, the out-of-plane thermal conductivities increase
with the relative densities of honeycomb cores as seen in Fig. 3(a). At
the density of 7.7%, the mean thermal conductivity of composite square
honeycomb structures is only 0.45 W/mK, which limits its application in
the heat dissipation fields.
The relative density of the composite honeycomb core is fixed at
7.7%. The out-of-plane thermal conductivity as a function of the HOGF
volume content is shown in Fig. 3(b). It can be observed that the ther-
mal conductivities obviously increase with the HOGF volume content.
The maximum mean thermal conductivity of MCHSS is up to 13.53 W/
mK corresponding to HOGF volume content of 6.14%. Compared with
traditional composite sandwich structures, the maximum improvement
on the measured thermal conductivity attains to more than 26 times. It
indicates that HOGF vastly improves the out-of-plane thermal conduc-
tivity of MCHSS. Nevertheless, the thermal conductivity does not in-
crease linearly with the HOGF volume content. It implies that there
may exist another factor that affects the out-of-plane thermal conduc-
tivity of MCHSS.
Fig. 7. The out-of-plane thermal conductivity of MCHSS vs. the HOGF volume content and the thermal conductivity of facesheet materials.
Fig. 8. The predicted out-of-plane thermal conductivity of MCHSS as a function of the
thermal conductivity of facesheet materials.
3.1.2. Interface
Fig. 4 shows the surface plots of the out-of-plane thermal conductivity
of MCHSS versus the HOGF volume content together with the interface
thermal resistance. Obviously, the out-of-plane thermal conductivity is
influenced not only by the HOGF volume content but also by the interface
thermal resistance in Fig. 4. It can be clearly seen that the thermal conduc-
tivities increase rapidly with increasing HOGF volume content and de-
creasing interface thermal resistance due to reducing effective thermal
resistance of cores.
Fig. 5(a) plots the thermal conductivity against the interface thermal
resistance for different HOGF volume contents, to intuitively show the
effect of the interface thermal resistance. It is obvious that the out-of-
plane thermal conductivities of MCHSS decrease rapidly with increasing
the interface thermal resistance at the same HOGF volume content. This
indicates that an effective method to enhance the out-of-plane thermal
conductivity is to reduce the interface thermal resistance between the
facesheet and the core as much as possible.
Meanwhile, according to Eq. (6), increasing the thickness H of the
sandwich structure can indirectly decrease the interface thermal resis-
tance phase 2RH , and then improves the out-of-plane thermal conductiv-
i
ity of the sandwich structure. Fig. 5(b) shows the variation of the out-of-
 G.-C. Yu et al. / Materials and Design 102 (2016) 238–246
Fig. 9. The measured out-of-plane compressive stress-strain responses of composite
square honeycomb structures.
plane thermal conductivity with the thickness of the sandwich structure.
The interface thermal resistance is assumed to be 0.2 ×10−3 m2 K/W in
this section. It can be clearly observed that the out-of-plane thermal con-
ductivities increase rapidly with the thickness of the sandwich structure
for different HOGF volume contents.
Above all, the interface affects greatly the out-of-plane thermal con-
ductivity of MCHSS. The corresponding experiments are conducted to
decrease the interface thermal resistance by using high thermal conduc-
tivity adhesive (J-TC) between the facesheets and the honeycomb core.
The relative density of the composite honeycomb core is fixed at 7.7%.
The measured out-of-plane thermal conductivities of MCHSS with dif-
ferent interface adhesives are shown in Fig. 6. Note that the thermal
conductivity of MCHSS with the adhesive layers of J-TC are higher
than that with J272-A. The experiment proves again that the interface
thermal resistance affects the out-of-plane thermal conductivity of
MCHSS. Moreover, it can be seen that the interface thermal resistance
with the adhesive layers of J-TC is much closer to 0.2 ×10−3 m2 K/W,
while that with J272-A is closer to 0.5 ×10−3 m2 K/W.
3.1.3. Facesheet materials
According to Eq. (9), it is well known that the thermal conductivity
of facesheet materials is another factor affecting the out-of-plane ther-
mal conductivity of MCHSS. In this part, the interface thermal resistance
is assumed to be 0.2 ×10−3 m2 K/W. The relative density of the com-
posite honeycomb core is fixed at 7.7%. Fig. 7 shows the variations of
Fig. 10. Measured failure mode and modified predicted model of composite square honeycomb structures under a compressive load.
243
the out-of-plane thermal conductivity versus the thermal conductivity
of facesheet materials together with HOGF volume content. It can be
intuitively seen that the out-of-plane thermal conductivity increases
quickly with the thermal conductivity of facesheet materials as well as
with the HOGF volume content.
The predicted out-of-plane thermal conductivity of MCHSS is shown
in Fig. 8 as a function of the thermal conductivity of facesheet materials.
It is noted that the thermal conductivity of the composite sandwich
structure increases obviously with the thermal conductivity of facesheet
materials when the thermal conductivity of facesheet materials is
b5 W/mK. As the thermal conductivity of facesheet materials is
N5 W/mK, the increasing amplitudes gradually decrease and the out-
of-plane thermal conductivities of MCHSS attain to constants at last.
These results indicate that the thermal conductivity of facesheet mate-
rials will make a little effect on the out-of-plane thermal conductivity of
MCHSS once the thermal conductivity of facesheet materials is over
5 W/mK.
3.2. Mechanical properties
It is well known that HOGF vastly improves the out-of-plane thermal
conductivity of MCHSS. Now consider how HOGF affects the mechanical
property of MCHSS. Owing to the weak mechanical properties (the
Young modulus is below 0.1 GPa and tensile strength below 28 MPa)
altogether with the small volume content, the effect of HOGF on the
mechanical property of MCHSS can be neglected.
As a baseline reference, the tensile and compressive tests of the
parent material of composite honeycomb cores are conducted with an
applied nominal strain rate 10−3 s−1, and the strain is inferred from
the displacements measured by a laser displacement extensometer.
The woven composites exhibit an approximately linear response prior
to failure, with tensile modulus 77 GPa, tensile strength 852 MPa, com-
pressive modulus 73.4 GPa and compressive strength 551 MPa. The
Poisson's ratio υ13 = υ31 is 0.1.
3.2.1. Compression
According to the classical theory of material mechanics, the equiva-
lent out-of-plane compressive modulus of square honeycomb cores
(Fig. 2) is given by
E33 ¼ E3 ρ ð4Þ
where E3 is the axial compressive modulus of the cell wall, and ρ is the
relative density of composite square honeycomb cores.
244 G.-C. Yu et al. / Materials and Design 102 (2016) 238–246

Fig. 11. Comparison of the predicted and measured values of the out-of-plane compressive strengths of composite square honeycombs.

Under out-of-plane compressive load, the composite square honey- mode shown in Fig. 10A, the theoretical model is modified as shown
comb core shows two possible failure modes: elastic bucking and plastic in Fig. 10B. The elastic buckling strength σpk of a square honeycomb
microbuckling of the cell wall. The minimum value of ultimate strengths core is modified as
predicted by different failure modes will be the effective out-of-plane
compressive strength. For different failure modes, the corresponding Kπ2 E1 t3
out-of-plane compressive strengths of square honeycomb cores are σ buck ¼ ðElastic buckingÞ: ð9Þ
6 ðH=2Þ2 L
given by [10]
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi  3 The buckling coefficient K lies in a range from 1.0 to 2.0. The predict-
Kπ 2 E1 E3 t
σ buck ¼ ðElastic buckingÞ ð7Þ ed and measured values of the compressive strengths are included in
6ð1−υ13 υ31 Þ L
Fig. 11. It can be found that K is close to 1.5.
σ pk ¼ σ c ρ ðPlastic microbucklingÞ ð8Þ
3.2.2. Shear
The peak shear strength of composite square honeycombs is again
where K is the buckling coefficient, E1 and E3 are the Young's modulus of
governed either by the elastic buckling of the cell walls, by the interfa-
the orthotropic faces along the x1 and x3 directions in Fig. 2, respective-
cial debonding or by the shear strength τs of the composite sheet
ly; υ13 and υ31 are the Poisson's ratio of honeycomb core walls, and σc
material when subjected to a shear stress. We consider each of these
the strength of the plastic microbuckling of honeycomb core walls.
mechanisms in turn.
The measured compressive stress-strain responses of honeycomb
Consider the elastic buckling of the cell walls that lie along the x1 di-
structures are plotted in Fig. 9. An initial linear response is observed in
rection. The principal bending rigidities of this cell wall are given as [11]
all cases. The subsequent softening after the peak stress is rather dra-
matic for the case of ρ ¼ 0:17. By contrast, the stress falls more gradually
for the lower density honeycomb cores. For the specimens with the E1 t 3 E3 t 3
D1 ¼ D3 ¼ : ð10Þ
relative densities of 0.039, 0.077 and 0.17, the mean strengths are 12ð1−υ13 υ31 Þ 12ð1−υ31 υ13 Þ
0.52 MPa, 4.55 MPa and 45.16 MPa, respectively.
According to Ref. [10,13], the buckling coefficient K should be equal The elastic shear buckling stress of a plate is given in terms of the
to 7.86. The predictive strengths of the specimens with three relative above rigidities as
densities are 7.67 MPa, 43.2 MPa and 92.7 MPa, respectively. Obviously,
the predictive values are much greater than the measurements. It shows qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
that the previous analytical model is not suitable for forecasting the π2
D1 D33 :
4
τb ¼ K 2
ð11Þ
compressive strengths of MCHSS in this paper. According to the failure t ðH=2Þ

Fig. 12. The measured out-of-plane shear stress versus shear strain responses of composite square honeycomb structures for α=0° and α=45°.
 G.-C. Yu et al. / Materials and Design 102 (2016) 238–246 245

The elastic buckling strength of a square honeycomb then follows as

cos α þ sin α
τbpk ¼ τb ρ : ð12Þ
2

The interfacial debonding strength of a square honeycomb follows as

cos α þ sin α
τcpk ¼ τc ρ ð13Þ
2

where τc is the bond adhesion strength between facesheets and honey-

comb cores.
When the peak stress of a square honeycomb is governed by the
shear failure of the composite material, the strength τpk is given in
terms of the strength τs of the cell wall material as

cos α þ sin α
τspk ¼ τs ρ : ð14Þ
2

Combining Eqs. (12–14), the peak shear strength of the honeycomb

is Fig. 13. The measured peak shear strengths of composite square honeycomb structures for
α=0° and α=45°. The predictions of the analytical model are also included as solid lines.
 
τpk ¼ min τ bpk ; τ cpk ; τspk : ð15Þ

The measured shear responses of composite square honeycomb
structures for α = 0° and α = 45° are plotted in Fig. 12. Samples with
three relative densities ρ ¼ 0:039, 0.077 and 0.125 are investigated in
shear. For test orientations with α = 0°, the cell walls in the plane nor-
mal to x2 of square honeycombs undergo shear strain, while the walls
in the plane normal to x1 deform by bending and carry a negligible frac-
tion of the load. Thus neglecting the contribution of the cell walls in the
plane normal to x1, a half of square honeycomb core is undergoing loads
in shear. Whereas, in the case of shear loading for α =45°, each cell wall
of the square honeycomb core carries loads in shear. The α =0° and α =
45° specimens display both a stiff linear response up to their peak
strength; a strongly post-peak softening response is observed. The mea-
sured peak shear strengths for both α = 0° and α = 45° are plotted
against the relative density ρ in Fig. 13. The model predictions are also
plotted on this figure. The theoretical results are in good agreement
with the experimental data. The shear strengths of both α = 0°and
α = 45° specimens increase with the relative density ρ, with the α =
45° honeycomb specimens stronger than the α = 0° honeycomb
specimens.
3.3. Multifunctional characteristic
specific strength and specific modulus of MCHSS is very small due to it-
self weak mechanical property. According to the predicted formulas,
HOGF decrease the specific compressive strength and specific compres-
sive modulus of MCHSS. Still, MCHSS possesses both a high specific ther-
mal conductivity and adequate mechanical properties, which satisfies
the multifunctional design requirement of sandwich structures and
shows good potential in the high-end heat dissipation field.
4. Conclusions
Multifunctional composite square honeycomb sandwich structures
are made from the plain woven carbon fiber composite laminates coat-
ed by HOGF. The analytical results reveal that the out-of-plane thermal
conductivity of MCHSS increases with increasing the HOGF volume con-
tent ρ f , the relative density of composite cores ρcomp , the thickness of
sandwich structures H and the thermal conductivity of facesheet mate-
rials kupper, together with decreasing the interface thermal resistance
Ri. Among them, increasing the HOGF volume content and decreasing
the interface thermal resistance are the most efficient methods. The
experimental results show that the maximum out-of-plane thermal

The mechanical properties (specific strength and specific modulus)

of MCHSS are plotted against the HOGF volume content in Fig. 14. The
relative density of composite honeycomb cores is fixed at 7.7%. The
interface thermal resistance is assumed to be 0.2 ×10−3 m2 K/W, and
the thickness of composite honeycomb cores is 30 mm. The dash curve
represents the mechanical properties (specific strength and specific
modulus) of MCHSS, and the solid curves represent the specific thermal
conductivities of MCHSS for different facesheet materials. It can be seen
that the specific strength of MCHSS is up to 40.8 ×103 m2/s2, and the
specific modulus attains to 49.7 ×106 m2/s2. However, the specific ther-
mal conductivity (thermal conductivity/density of MCHSS concluding
the facesheet and adhesive) is only 1.6 ×10−3 Wm2/(K⋅ Kg). With the in-
creasing of HOGF volume content, the specific thermal conductivities of
MCHSS increase at first owing to the high thermal conduction character-
istic of HOGF, and decrease afterwards because of the effect of the
interface thermal resistance. As the thermal conductivities of facesheet
materials are assumed to be 0.5, 1.0, 5.0 and 100 W/mK,the maximum
specific thermal conductivities of MCHSS attain to 58, 78, 111 and
125 ×10−3 Wm2/(K⋅ Kg), respectively. Meanwhile, the specific strengths
and specific modulus of MCHSS decrease with the increasing of HOGF Fig. 14. The predicted out-of-plane specific compressive properties and the predicted
volume content. The reason is that the contribution of HOGF on the specific thermal conductivities of MCHSS as a function of the HOGF volume content.
246 G.-C. Yu et al. / Materials and Design 102 (2016) 238–246
conductivity of MCHSS attains to 13.53 W/mK, which is more than 26
times that of traditional composite honeycomb sandwich structures.
Moreover, MCHSS exhibit adequate mechanical properties, although
the added weight of HOGF decreases the specific compressive proper-
ties (strength and modulus) of MCHSS due to the weak mechanical
property of HOGF. Above all, the multifunctional composite square
honeycomb sandwich structures appear to be a promising candidate
for the high-end heat dissipation applications.
Acknowledgments
The present work is supported by the Major State Basic Research
Development Program of China (973 Program) under Grant No. 2011
CB610303.
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