Objective The critical compartments of deep-sea large-scale scientific facilities must withstand nuclear explosion impacts. Traditional steel structures struggle to balance lightweight design, low space occupation, and high blast resistance. This paper proposes a novel sandwich bulkhead design incorporating a negative Poisson's ratio corrugated-tube metamaterial that enables quasi-static conversion of impact processes.

Methods The mechanism of a 3D negative Poisson's ratio corrugated-tube metamaterial capable of converting nonlinear impact into quasi-static processes is introduced. Under the constraint of similar weight and space occupation, both a sandwich bulkhead incorporating this metamaterial and a conventional bulkhead are designed for the facility's key protective compartment. LS-DYNA parametric analysis is employed to optimize the unit cell angle and wall thickness. Based on the nuclear blast load specified in GJB1060.1−1991, numerical simulations are conducted to analyze the influence of unit cell angle and wall thickness on impact resistance.

Results The optimal protective performance is achieved with a unit cell wall thickness of 0.6 mm and an angle of 21.250°. Compared with the conventional bulkhead, the maximum impact displacement of the metamaterial sandwich bulkhead is reduced by 58.53% and the maximum reduced by 14.25%, with lower weight and space occupation. The stress remains below the yield strength of H36 steel (370 MPa), satisfying elastic design requirements.

Conclusion The corrugated-tube metamaterial can significantly reduce stress and deformation without increasing weight, achieving elastic design and providing a directly implementable solution for lightweight anti-nuclear blast protection in ship and ocean engineering applications.