Fatigue performance of sandwich beams with peel stoppers

This paper concerns a newly developed peel stopper for sandwich structures, which may be embedded as a core insert or an edge stiffener. The major purpose of the peel stopper is to prevent large debonds/delaminations between face sheets and core in sandwich structures in the case of failure. Experimental investigations of conventional sandwich beams and beams furnished with peel stoppers, under static and fatigue loading conditions, and with temperature monitoring, were conducted. The experimental programme included investigation of crack initiation and propagation, as well as of fatigue endurance of conventional and modified sandwich beams. The results showed that although the peel stoppers did not significantly influence the fatigue life of the sandwich beams, they were exceptionally effective in re-routing the crack propagation away from the face?core interface. Moreover, one of the two peel stopper designs presented prevented face?core debonding/delamination and total failure of the sandwich beams.