Development and Characterization of Nano Clay Reinforced Three-Phase Sandwich Composite Laminates

Polymer based sandwich composites are widely used in the development of components for aircraft, railway coaches and marine application. Among the varieties, Glass-Jute fiber hybrid and Glass fiber-PS foam core sandwich laminates find wider application in the railway coaches and building of boat hulls, because of its unique properties such as high strength and stiffness-to-weight ratio and good damping property. In the present investigation, PS foam-GFR sandwich laminates are fabricated with a total of four layers of glass fiber in the skin and PS foam as core, by varying wt% of nano clay in polyester resin so as to obtain four different combinations of PS foam-GFR sandwich laminates. Various tests are undertaken to study the properties. In general, the results of the various experiments have shown that, the nanoclay modified polyester resin sandwich laminates exhibit the highest mechanical properties when compared to the unmodified polyester resin composite laminates. In addition to the mechanical tests, X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDS) have been carried out to examine the microstructure and elemental composition of the fabricated composites. From the analysis, it is observed that, the samples containing nanoclay contain more of Silicon and Aluminium due to nanoclay loading in the matrix. The relative comparison has also been made between Jute-GFR hybrid and GFR-PS foam sandwich laminates for suitable application of composites.