Production and characterization of epoxy syntactic foam filled epoxy sphere

Abstract

The primary aim of this research is to identify the properties of the epoxy syntactic foam (ESF) and the physical factor that will alter their properties. The Epoxy Syntactic Foam (ESF) that were used in this study was ESF filled with hollow sphere epoxy (EHoS). The hollow sphere epoxy were produced by the coating of expended polystyrene (EPS) by the epoxy before the EPS were shrank and produce the hollow sphere epoxy. The main variables that focused in this research are closely related to the epoxy hollow sphere (EHoS). There are two distinct size of EHoS were studied in this research. There were several testing run to determine the mechanical and physical properties of the different cell size ESF and different cell wall thickness of EHoS in the ESF. The mechanical properties of the ESF were examined by the compression test while the physical properties of the samples were examined by the OM aided with Image J software in order to determine the dimension and distribution of the cell. In addition, the physical properties were also tested by the density test in order to figure out how the sizes of the hollow sphere influence the mass and density of the sample. Based on the result of this research the modulus and compression strength display the same performance graph phenomenon when the compression strength and modulus of the ESF is in optimum performance when the EHoS is double coated medium size hollow sphere since the single coated large EHoS perform the same as controlled sample. In other words the modulus and compression strength of ESF increase when the thickness of the cell wall EHoS increases and the smaller EHoS able to provide batter mechanical properties. For the physical test of density test the simple interaction between the EHoS and density is the large EHoS provide less dense than medium size EHoS.