Effect of Hollow Glass Microsphere (HGM) on Impact and Flexural Properties of High-Density Syntactic Foam Based Epoxy Composites

Abstract

Syntactic foam composite offers versatile application possibilities in marine, structural, aerospace industries due to their good tensile, flexural, and compressive strength, corrosive resistance, high specific strength and modulus, light weight nature. Their porous structure is by mixing hollow particles called microspheres as fillers into matrix materials such as polymer, metal or ceramic etc. In this study, a high-density hollow glass microsphere is used to fabricate syntactic foam by mixing it with epoxy resin. Five different compositions 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 vol% of hollow glass microspheres were varied in fabricating the syntactic foam. Impact and flexural properties were investigated on the syntactic foam. All the compositions of the volume fraction variations of hollow glass microsphere content in the syntactic foam increased more than the neat epoxy. The highest impact resistance, flexural strength and flexural modulus is at 5 vol%, 113.12 kJ/m2, 86.7 MPa, and 80 GPa respectively with 25.2%, 38.29%, and 33.25% increase respectively more the neat epoxy while the specific impact and flexural strength is at 25 vol% with 53.78% and 57.77% increase respectively more than the neat epoxy.