Effect of water absorption, hardness, and acoustic properties on sandwich syntactic foam composite for structural and marine applications
Olusegun Adigun Afolabi, T. P. Mohan, Krishnan Kanny
Abstract
Abstract In this study, a sandwich composite structure was fabricated with core syntactic foam composites (SFC) reinforced with face-sheets of combined kenaf and glass fibers. The core SFC was made from hollow glass microsphere (HGM)/epoxy resin mixture. The focus of this study is to design a suitable material for marine, automobile, and structural applications by investigating the water absorption capacity, hardness, buoyancy, and acoustic resistance level of the sandwich composite. Four sequences of face-sheet reinforcement [e.g. kenaf-kenaf(KK); glass-glass(GG); glass-kenaf(GK), and kenaf-glass(KG)] were adopted. The results show that the KK sandwich absorbed more water, with buoyancy level of 0.329% than other sequence. GK shows the highest sandwich in hardness strength with 58Hv, and 35% more than the KK, while there was no significant difference in the sound pressure level of the sandwich composite.