Mechanical Properties of Sandwich Composites Reinforced by Nanoclays: An Overview

Abstract

Structural sandwich composites have been widely used in many engineering applications, and this trend continues due to their superior mechanical properties, thermal insulation and acoustic damping. However, to further improve their mechanical properties, literature reports significant benefits obtained with nano-reinforcements. In this context, nanoclays are the most popular nano-reinforcements for polymeric nanocomposites, due to their relatively high ion exchange capacity, high aspect ratio and economic advantages. In order to stablish a systematic understanding for design criteria, this work intends to summarize all studies present in the open literature about this topic. It was possible to conclude that using nanoclays improves the mechanical properties of structural sandwich composites, especially in terms of impact strength. Nevertheless, the benefits obtained regarding fatigue performance are not adequately reported in the literature, revealing the need to develop these studies.

Development of epoxy-based sandwich composite panel with hollow glass microspheres/clay hybrid core and banana fiber facesheet for structural applications

“…Studying the tensile and flexural characteristics of sandwich composites consisting of a syntactic foam core and paper skin, it was found that, depending on the starch content of the glue used to join the paper skin and core, the skin paper increased the projected flexural strength by 40 % over syntactic foams [ 42 ]. Hybrid-filled foam panel made with HGM in an epoxy matrix has shown to be a suitable material with great structural strength due to its high specific stiffness and low density [ 39 , 44 ] and likewise, incorporation of nanoclay at the core or skin level of sandwich composite has been proven to enhance the toughness and impact performance of lightweight materials [ 40 , 45 ] because nanoclay has proven to be an effective filler with strong significant improvement in impact damage tolerance [ 46 ] and combining these fillers as the hybrid core will offer valuable insights into developing efficient strategies for fabrication of sandwich panels. Therefore, a sandwich composite structure developed with HGM and nanoclay as a hybrid core with banana fiber facesheets provides a novel approach to improving the structural, water uptake, buoyancy, and morphology behavior of sandwich composite panels because this area of study has not been fully explored.…”

Effect of water absorption, hardness, and acoustic properties on sandwich syntactic foam composite for structural and marine applications

“…Different fibers (both natural and synthetic) have been employed as the reinforced face-sheet in sandwich composite. Natural fibers are product of plant remains such as kenaf, jute, banana, flax, hemp, etc., and are regarded as renewable and biodegradable materials which have several economic, environmental, and ecological advantages over synthetic fibers [1,[5][6][7]. Synthetic fibers such as glass and carbon fibers are non-renewable and emit greenhouse gases effect which causes global warming.…”

Mechanical behavior of GFRP-Polymer sandwich composites with montmorillonite nanoclay

“…The static flexural strength of former composites with 2 wt.% of clay increases by 16 and 24%, respectively. Other studies reporting mechanical behavior of composites with nanoclay are described in [9][10][11][12][13][14][15].…”