Investigation of mechanical characterization of hybrid sandwich composites with syntactic foam core for structural applications

In this work, mechanical performance on sandwich composites consisting of syntactic foam filled with hollow glass microsphere in an epoxy resin matrix as the core material and hybrid kenaf/glass fibers face-sheet based composites panel is studied. The main purpose of this work is to design a suitable lightweight composite panel material for structural application. Four different sequences of face-sheet reinforcement (e.g., kenaf-kenaf; glass-glass; glass-kenaf, and kenaf-glass) were adopted. In this study, the mechanical properties and failure modes are carefully investigated. The sandwich composites were characterized by compressive, tensile, and flexural properties. The results showed that compressive strength was highest at the “kenaf-glass” face-sheets, tensile strength was highest at “glass-glass” face-sheets, and flexural at “glass-glass” face-sheets with 52.1%, 67.6%, and 74.4% increase to “kenaf-kenaf” face-sheets, respectively. The tensile strength and modulus values with the specific strengths and modulus values showed that the mechanical properties of the sandwich composites can be influenced by hybridizing the face-sheet laminates of the composite. This shows that kenaf fiber has limited strength when used as reinforcement alone but gave an excellent performance when combined with glass fiber.