Mechanical properties of low density glass microballoon/vinyl ester syntactic foam for marine application

Mechanical properties of low density glass microballoon/vinyl ester syntactic foam for marine application

Light weight material and suitable mechanical properties hold promise for the development of structures for marine application. Syntactic foam is a composite material which exhibits all these characteristics shows potential. Its capabilities need to be investigated. In this paper, mechanical properties such as compression behaviour of glass microballoon/vinyl ester syntactic foams give good results as discussed. Generally, based on the compression results for different weight percentages (wt.%) of glass micro-balloons starting from neat resin, 5.0 – 25.0 wt.% shows that the strength values are varied when microballoon contents are increased. The different modes of fracture also show the different crack behaviours for all specimens while the performance of syntactic foams reduces with increasing of glass microballoon contents. Hence, all these results need to have further investigation and also discussion, particularly for low density syntactic foams used in marine application.