Elastic behaviour of plain and fibre-reinforced syntactic foams under compression

Syntactic foams (SF) with 0, 0.9, 1.76, 2.54, 3.54 and 4.5 vol.% of E-glass fibres in the form of chopped strands were processed and subjected to compressive loading. It was found that introduction of chopped strand fibres into the syntactic foam system increases compressive modulus values. The values increased with the content of fibres in the system except for the one containing 3.54% of fibres, which showed a lower value than other fibre-reinforced systems, thus deviating from the trend. This exception was attributed to the difference in processing route adopted for this particular fibre-bearing foam. However, in general, the incorporation of chopped strand fibres improved the elastic property of the syntactic foam system without much variation in density as it is evident from the specific modulus values reported in this work. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.