Lightweight and High-Strength Sandwich Panels: Materials, Core Architectures, Manufacturing, Mechanical Performance, Multifunctionality and Future Perspectives.

Lightweight and high-strength sandwich panels are used across aerospace, transportation, marine, energy, civil and protective systems because large face separation can provide high flexural rigidity and specific load capacity at low mass. This review treats the panel as a coupled material-structure-interface-process system rather than ranking core topology in isolation. A scoping-review workflow was updated to 24 July 2026 and yielded a curated evidence corpus of 112 total references. The review reports the search and screening logic explicitly, uses descriptive rather than field-wide bibliometric claims, and organizes the synthesis around component roles, governing mechanisms, connection regions, performance requirements and application-driven selection. Conventional foam, honeycomb and corrugated cores are compared with lattice-truss, auxetic, origami/kirigami, hierarchical, bio-inspired, graded and triply periodic minimal-surface (TPMS) architectures. Particular emphasis is placed on face-core and nodal junctions, static and dynamic failure-mode competition, fatigue and environmental degradation, fire/thermal/acoustic functions, additive-manufacturing defects, modelling fidelity, and active/adaptive concepts using shape-memory alloys and piezoelectric actuation. Cross-study numerical envelopes that could not be traced to harmonized test conditions are not used as universal rankings; instead, a mechanism-based screening matrix identifies design strengths, limitations and reporting requirements. The synthesis indicates that engineering deployment depends on preserving intended load paths in the as-manufactured panel, controlling interfaces and defects, validating multi-hazard durability and connections at scale, and integrating multifunctional or adaptive functions without creating new weak links.