Abstract
During the coronavirus pandemic, there have been significant challenges in the remote teaching and demonstration of experiments, especially those that require laboratory testing equipment. With a desire to give students a feel for our materials laboratory on open days and allow them to gain a deeper understanding of what materials science and engineering is about, we have designed an experiment focused on composite materials that can be performed remotely and without specialist equipment. This enabled students to experience a bend test sensorily through seeing, hearing and feeling it, creating a strong link to then being able to relate it to the pre-prepared experimental data taken in the laboratory. This fun, easy-to-run and engaging experiment allowed a shared experience and encouraged a discussion about students’ observations, differences in results and implications of the bend strength of sandwich composites. We have found it not only works well universally by all ages but can be used with younger children to think about words such as ‘stronger’, ‘stiffer’ and ‘flexible’ and how materials can be different in different directions.
Highlights
There has been quite a bit of use of measuring chocolate samples as a method of engaging students with Materials Science and Engineering events. This has included the testing of the toughness of chocolate at various temperatures [3, 4] which was further extended to examine the performance of a lightweight, stiff material, using high performance composite chocolates [5]
Following the home-test, we provided the participants with the quantitative data, obtained using equipment in our Materials Science and Engineering teaching laboratory, to contextualise the theory and to facilitate discussion surrounding the implications of the results in component design
The purpose of this study was to develop a practical experiment to demonstrate simple material testing procedures to understand the properties of sandwich composite materials
Summary
One of the first composites documented was in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in 3400 BC These early engineers found that if they glued wood strips on top of each other at different angles, it created a plywood that was stronger than just lining the pieces up in the same orientation. While the core material typically has a lower strength, its greater thickness provides the sandwich structure composite with a lower overall density but an increased bending stiffness. This combination of properties makes it ideal for use in lightweight, stiff structures such as the fuselage of an aircraft. Such materials were used in 1940, in WWII for the production of a British twin-engine multirole combat aircraft: the Mosquito, known as the ‘The Wooden Wonder’ as it incorporated a plywood-balsa-plywood ‘sandwich’ giving the fuselage exceptional rigidity from the bonded structure
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