In current research wood based sandwich panels with the Den-droLight® cellular core have been investigated numerically and experimentally. Application of DendroLight® cellular wood material is novel in engineering practice thus technological and quality assurance aspects should be elaborated in more detail. Den-droLight® is made from profiled wood boards stacked in perpen-dicular layers and sliced in perpendicular direction to board’s layer plane. Obtaining reduced weight of such a structure (approximately 60 % of solid wood), it is mainly used in furniture industry as core material for laminated sandwich panels. However improved mul-tifunctional properties (like thermal resistance and sound isolation) of such material, has a potential of utilising it as core layer also in building structures as load bearing sandwich panels for example walls and floors. Thus achieving the multifunctionality of proposed concept where material play significant role for developing new generation of building structures [1]. One of the problems restricting production of the load bearing sandwich panels is lack of reliable design tool to predict mechanical, thermal and acoustic isolation properties of various configuration sandwich panels. The complex topology of the DendroLight® makes it difficult task for analytical predictions to match the actual behavior of the structure under the physical load. In contrary, the numerical finite element (FE) analysis allows to simulate sandwich panels studying the cellular wood core behavior under any loading condition with considerable reliability. The aim of current research was to create the FE model of sandwich panel with DendroLight® core, and to verify its mechanical and thermal properties compared with the physical tests. Commercially available FE software ANSYS has been used for the simulation task. To describe DendroLight® structure, SHELL el-ements with transverse isotropic wood mechanical properties have been used (Fig. 1). Corresponding properties of the plywood or the high density fiberboard (HDF) also were assigned for the sandwich panel skins. Geometrical properties of the sandwich panel and the core web thicknesses have been made as parametrical values bearing in mind further need to utilize developed model for opti-mization task. During the research it has been identified that model with detailed core structure is reasonable solution only for small scale sandwich specimens with the length not exceeding 1 m. For larger structures it is more reasonable to use the core layer with equivalent DendroLight® stiffness [2]. As determining of the equivalent stiffness also was in scope of the current research. Step by step model validation is essentially important for creating of numerical model with realistic mechanical behavior. For this reason series of mechanical tests under various loading modes have been performed on ZWICK Z100 testing machine. Six different series of bending specimens and four series of compression specimens have been experimentally tested. The bending test set-up has been used to test the sandwich beams with 50 mm width and various thicknesses and the skin materials (Fig. 2). Compression tests were performed on specimens with overall dimensions 40x200x200 – according to EN789 standard [3]. Deformation of the specimens has been measured mainly by the crosshead displacement of the machine. For several specimens the strain gauges has been also attached on the lower skin surface. The deflections of four different series of bending specimens have been measured using non-contact optical measuring system ARAMIS (Fig. 3). Usage of optical measuring system allows acquiring deformation values for any position on specimen cross section and it gives wider opportunities to verify numerical and experimental deformation results (Fig. 4). The thermal flux q values calculated with DendroLight® numerical model created in ANSYS (Fig. 5) has been verified with experi-mentally acquired q [W/m2] values. Experimentally the thermal properties of the sandwich structures has been acquired using the hot box testing equipment according to the standard ISO 8990 [4]. In general a good agreement has been achieved between experimental and numerical models using mechanical and thermal models. Taking into account original scatter of wood mechanical properties it may be considered as a good basis for further exploi-tation of the model for creating the large scale sandwich panel structures.