Abstract
Syntactic foams are particulate composite materials that are extensively integrated in naval and aerospace structures as core materials for sandwich panels. While several studies have demonstrated the potential of syntactic foams as energy absorbing materials in impact tests, our understanding of their response to water impact remains elusive. In this work, we attempt a first characterization of the behavior of a vinyl ester/glass syntactic subject to slamming. High-speed imaging is leveraged to elucidate the physics of water impact of syntactic foam wedges in a free-fall drop tower. From the images, we simultaneously measure the deformation of the wedge and the hydrodynamic loading, thereby clarifying the central role of fluid–structure interaction during water impact. We study two different impact heights and microballoon density to assess the role of impact energy and syntactic foam composition on the slamming response. Our results demonstrate that both these factors have a critical role on the slamming response of syntactic foams. Reducing the density of microballoons might help to reduce the severity of the hydrodynamic loading experienced by the wedge, but this comes at the expense of a larger deformation. Such a larger deformation could ultimately lead to failure for large drop heights. These experimental results offer compelling evidence for the role of hydroelastic coupling in the slamming response of syntactic foams.
Highlights
Syntactic foams are a class of lightweight composites that are synthesized by dispersing hollow particles in a matrix material [1]
Different from any of the previous efforts on the slamming of lightweight composites [29,30,31,32,33], we propose the integration of particle image velocimetry (PIV) for the evaluation of the hydrodynamic loading experienced by the composites during the impact
We investigated the water impact of vinyl ester/glass microballoons syntactic foams
Summary
Syntactic foams are a class of lightweight composites that are synthesized by dispersing hollow particles in a matrix material [1]. An excellent review of the state-of-the art can be found in [10], where experiments on vinyl ester, polyester, polypropylene, and polyvinylchloride matrix syntactic foams are comprehensively collated from the literature [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24] and strengthened by new experiments on vinyl ester systems for varying microballoon wall thicknesses and volume fractions While these efforts have clarified the role of physical and microstructural properties on the impact response of syntactic foams, our comprehension of the behavior of syntactic foams as structural elements in marine vessels and aircraft remains elusive. Slamming is responsible for severe loading conditions, where pressure as high as few MegaPascal are attained in Materials 2017, 10, 224; doi:10.3390/ma10030224 www.mdpi.com/journal/materials
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