Foam sandwich composites with cyanate ester based syntactic foam as core and carbon-cyanate ester as skin: Processing and properties

Foam sandwich composites were processed using cyanate ester-based syntactic foam as core and carbon fabric-cyanate ester composite as skin. They were processed by a one-step compression-molding technique. The mechanical performance of the sandwich composites was evaluated in terms of flatwise tensile strength (FTS), flatwise compressive strength, and edgewise compressive strength. The dependency of these properties on the core composition was investigated. FTS initially increased with the increase in resin content of the syntactic foam core. However, higher resin content in the core led to a diminution in FTS due to high void content. The flatwise compressive strength and edgewise compressive strength and the corresponding moduli values showed an increasing trend with increase in resin content of the core despite the presence of voids at high resin content. The failure modes of the composites under different loading conditions have been examined. (C) 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.