Flexural Properties of Al/Floral Foam Sandwich Composite Prepared by Hand Lay Up Process

The flexural properties of aluminum sheet as the facings and floral foam as the core in layered sandwich composite were studied under three-point bending test. Adhesion of core onto aluminum sheets was done by manually spreading mixture of epoxy resin and hardener via hand lay-up procedure. There were four system studied, which are single foam-core sandwich system until four foam-core sandwich system. It was found that single foam-core sandwich has the highest flexural strength over the range of Al/floral foam-core sandwich system. The single foam-core sandwich has a well stress or total load distribution as compared to other three types of sandwiches. The smaller thickness to width ratio of single foam-core system is believed to enable the homogenous stress distribution of loading during testing. In addition, several modes of failure found such as delamination, crack and core failure. As the number of layers of sandwich increase, there were more modes of failure occur, which mostly due to the core failure of floral foam. (paper)