Behaviour of innovative fibre composite sandwich panels for structural applications

Abstract

Sandwich composites are widely used in various industries such as aeronautical,mechanical, automotive, marine and others. However, most of the existing sandwiches are not suitable and cost effective for applications in civil infrastructure.An innovative fibre composite sandwich panel made of glass fibre reinforced skins and a high strength core material has been developed for building and other structural applications. The behaviour of this new generation sandwich panel has been studied to assist the technical persons and the construction crews in better understanding its properties for an efficient use. This project seeks to investigate the behaviour of fibre composite sandwich panels for their use in flooring applications under different loading conditions. The properties of the sandwich panels will be determined firstly before the panels are tested under different loading conditions of point load and uniformly distributed load. The main objectives of this project are to research the background information relating to sandwich panels for civil design purposes, conduct initial testing of the core, skin and sandwich panel to gain material properties and use those material properties for finite element analysis in Strand7. Testing will then be completed on slab specimens under point load and uniformly distributed loading conditions and evaluate results and recommend changes to design or testing. This process will be repeated for variables such as fibre orientation, fixity and one and two-way spanning slab systems. The panels were found to behave similarly under both loading conditions with the slab system and fixity not having a dramatic effect on failure mode or deflection. The 0° main fibre orientation deflected less than 90° main fibre orientation due to increases stiffness. The modelling of point load system was found to be very accurate due to almost exact replication of experimental test being achieved. The modelling of the UDL analysis was not as accurate as point loading, due to variables in experimental testing that were not able to be achieved in finite element model