Bending strength of cenosphere foam cored jute/glass skin sandwiches

Abstract

Sandwich construction is widely used in structural application because of its high bending stiffness coupled with lightweight. In design of sandwiches, skin made of high modulus of elasticity is used with core of high shear modulus. This balance is important so that neither material fails long before the other is stressed to accepted level. In the present study, experiments have been carried out on polymeric foam core sandwich beams with jute/epoxy faces. Syntactic polymeric foam cores, which have high compressive strength compared to open cell foams are made by mixing hollow fly-ash particles called cenospheres in a matrix material. The variable considered is the density of the core varied by differing the volume fraction of cenospheres. Cenospheres used in the present study are obtained from flyash, a waste byproduct of thermal power plants using a low cost separation process. Cores with four different volume fractions are prepared and sandwiched between a set of jute fabric layers. It is noticed that as volume fraction of cenospheres increased density is decreasing (1.12 to 0.98 g/cm3). The sandwich beams cut from the samples are tested using standard three-point bending procedure and the results obtained are compared with the results of glass skin sandwich with similar cores. Results showed a large difference in specific strengths of glass and jute skin sandwiches, which could be attributed to high tensile strength of glass fiber compared to jute fiber. There is a decrease of about 13% and 8% from the maximum specific strength for glass skin and jute skin sandwiches respectively at higher volume fractions of cenospheres. This could be traced to the failure of core well before the skin is stressed to accepted level in case of glass skin sandwiches. The jute skin sandwiches exhibited a little flatter specific strength response with respect to volume fraction of cenospheres indicating matching of the features pertaining to jute skin and the core properties. As the specific strength per unit cost of jute approaches that of glass, jute may be used to replace glass fiber with a significant cost advantage for less demanding applications.