Ablative composites are heat shielding, protective materials that are being used in aerospace industry to protect inner hardware and sensitive devices. The aero dynamic vehicles have to face high stresses, ultra high temperature and adverse conditions of air friction. It is required to develop the materials with light weight and high modulus. EPDM, being heat and ozone attack resistant is the best candidate for the preparation of ablative composites by introducing different heat sinks such as silica, glass fiber, carbon fiber, asbestos, carbon and their combinations have been studied in this work. The prepared materials were tested and it was found that visco elastic behavior of the composites affected by the addition of reinforcing filler (carbon, silica), semi-reinforcing filler (carbon fiber, glass fiber) and non-reinforcing filler (asbestos powder). Mechanical properties tested at different rates, revealed the improvement in tensile strength and % elongation in case of reinforcing and semi-reinforcing fillers but showed adverse effect in case of non-reinforcing fillers. Rheological investigations of these novel composites shows that moony viscosity of the materials containing glass fiber, carbon fiber, silica decreases in the order glass fiber > carbon fiber > silica.

The effects of hydrothermal aging and low velocity impact loading on E-glass fiber/epoxy composite pipes subjected to a continuous internal pressure were experimentally investigated in this paper. The pipes were manufactured by the commonly adopted filament winding method, which is consisting of six antisymmetric layers with (±55°)3 winding angles. Then, they were immersed in tap water at intervals of 500, 1000 and 1500 h. Low velocity impact tests were performed at three different energy levels (5, 7.5 and 10 J), followed by internal pressure testing. The results showed that both impact energy levels and water immersion time have significantly affected the burst strength of the pipe. It also indicated that the peak force and displacement increased with the increase of impact energy. During the burst pressure tests, weepage and eruption failures were observed.