Popular cellular solids including: metallic, ceramic and polymer foams, honeycombs and micro-truss structures are all commonly utilized for core materials within sandwich panels. The cellular core offers a unique strain softening failure mechanism allowing more energy to be absorbed while transferring relatively low stress to supporting structures. Currently most cellular solid sandwich panel cores require multiple advanced manufacturing procedures that drive increasing cost for applications. Pumice is a low cost naturally occurring cellular solid that exhibits a microstructure very similar to advanced ceramic foams.

This paper presents a manufacturing process for producing composite panels of pumice stones and epoxy binder. This cost and weight efficient structure is evaluated through mechanical testing and investigated for possible applications towards blast mitigation. Mechanical performance at various relative densities will be presented and compared to currently available core materials using traditional scaling models. Shock physics hydro-code simulations will be presented to evaluate pumice's potential within large scale blast mitigation applications.