Effect of thermal loading on syntactic foam sandwich composite

Abstract

An experimental investigation carried out on the deflection behavior of sandwich composites with a fly ash cenosphere/epoxy syntactic foam core and plain-woven sisal fiber fabric/epoxy skin subjected to nonuniform heating is presented. The influence of cenosphere volume fraction in the syntactic foam core, three different heating cases (increase-decrease, decrease, and decrease-increase), and cenospheres’ surface treatment effect is analyzed. The temperature deflection is acquired with the help of a LabVIEW program. The critical buckling and snap-initiation temperatures are found from the temperature-deflection plots. It is observed that the sandwich beam undergoes snap-through buckling behavior due to viscoelastic forces associated with the syntactic foam core. The critical buckling temperature increases with the filler content, and the surface treatment enhances the buckling behavior marginally. Results also demonstrate that the sandwiching of the syntactic foam core between the natural fiber skin enhances critical buckling temperatures compared to the syntactic foam core. © 2020 Society of Plastics Engineers