Design, fabrication and performance studies on aerogel-filled sandwich composites

• Main Author: Ho, Jian Yang.
• Other Authors: Sunil Chandrakant Joshi
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Aeronautical engineering::Materials of construction
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/38911
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The strength-to-weight ratio is an important parameter in material applications, especially in the aerospace industry. Composite sandwich structures comprising of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) as face materials with other core materials serve as a current practice to obtain strong and lightweight structures. Silica aerogel is a potential core material with its light weight, excellent strength-to-weight ratio and superb insulating properties. In this project, the possibility of integrating aerogel as a core material in CFRP composite sandwich structures will be investigated. Different possible configurations of aerogel-filled sandwich composites were designed, fabricated and tested during the course of this project. Other core materials used include shredded Unifoam® and HexWeb® A1 honeycomb. This project aims to explore on how different structural configurations of aerogel-filled sandwich composites will affect their mechanical properties. Thereafter, the mechanical properties of these sandwich composites would be compared with honeycomb sandwich composites as reference. Shredded Unifoam® was first used as core material in replacement of aerogel particles for preliminary analysis of different structural configurations. The configurations which displayed superior properties were selected for subsequent fabrications and evaluations. Experimental results reveal that fabricated specimens of aerogel-filled sandwich composites have higher mass and greater dimensional variation as compared to honeycomb sandwich composites. Aerogel-filled sandwich composites with internal compartments were found to be stronger by 134% with a mass increase of only 9%, as compared to without compartments. In addition, the maximum bending load of aerogel-filled sandwich composites is capable of reaching 58% to that of honeycomb sandwich composites. A list of recommendations for future work is presented towards the end of this report. The methods of fabricating aerogel-filled sandwich composites were also constantly investigated and improved on throughout the progress of the project.