Mechanical properties of sandwich composite made of syntactic foam core and GFRP skins

Mechanical properties of sandwich composite made of syntactic foam core and GFRP skins

Sandwich composites or sandwich panels have been widely used as potential materials or building structures and are regarded as a lightweight material for marine applications. In particular, the mechanical properties, such as the compressive, tensile and flexural behaviour, of sandwich composites formed from glass fibre sheets used as the skin and glass microballoon/vinyl ester as the syntactic foam core were investigated in this report. This syntactic foam core is sandwiched between unidirectional glass fibre reinforced plastic (GFRP) using vinyl ester resins to build high performance sandwich panels. The results show that the compressive and tensile strengths decrease when the glass microballoon content is increased in syntactic foam core of sandwich panels. Moreover, compressive modulus is also found to be decreased, and there is no trend for tensile modulus. Meanwhile, the flexural stiffness and effective flexural stiffness for edgewise position have a higher bending as 50% and 60%, respectively. Furthermore, the results indicated that the glass microballoon mixed in a vinyl ester should be controlled to obtain a good combination of the tensile, compressive and flexural strength properties.

© 2016 Md Mainul Islam, et al., licensee AIMS Press. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)