Experimental and numerical investigation on dynamic response of sinusoidal corrugated steel plates subjected to out-of-plane impact loading

The corrugated steel plate (CSP) exhibits significant mechanical advantages over their flat counterpart, particularly in terms of the increased bending stiffness, improved load-bearing capacity, and enhanced buckling resistance. In this study, low-velocity impact tests were carried out on seven sinusoidal CSPs by a drop weight testing system, and a novel confinement device was developed to achieve fixed boundaries at both ends of the CSP. The design parameters which exhibited significant effects on out-of-plane impact responses of CSPs were considered, including impact velocity, steel plate thickness, and hammer shape. Increasing the thickness from 2.86 mm to 4.71 mm significantly improved the impact resistance of the CSP, leading to a 45.51 % reduction in maximum displacement. Under low-velocity impact, although the impact velocity obviously influenced the CSP's deformation, causing a 40.78 % increase in maximum displacement as the velocity rose from 5.26 m/s to 7.13 m/s, the impact force plateau remained nearly unchanged until evident membrane effect occurred. Additionally, the CSPs exhibited similar impact processes subjected to different hammer shapes, with the difference in impact force plateau less than 6 %. Numerical studies on impact responses of the CSPs were conducted via the LS-DYNA program, and the internal force distributions, internal energy and stress contours of the CSPs, derived from finite element (FE) predictions, were discussed. The FE results revealed that the impact resistance of the CSP was primarily governed by the central three corrugations, whereas the central single corrugation under direct hammer impact absorbed most of the impact energy.