Effect of volume fraction and wall thickness on the elastic properties of hollow particle filled composites

Hollow particle filled composites, called syntactic foams, are widely used in applications requiring high damage tolerance and low density. The understanding of the mechanics of these materials is largely based on experimental studies. Predictive models that are capable of estimating the elastic properties of these materials over wide variation of particle wall thickness, size, and volume fraction are not yet fully developed. The present study is focused on developing a modeling scheme to estimate the elastic constants for such materials. The elastic properties of an infinitely dilute dispersion of microballoons in a matrix material are first computed by solving a dilatation and a shear problem. A differential scheme is then used to extrapolate the elastic properties of composites with high volume fractions of microballoons. The results show that the model is successful in predicting the Young's modulus for syntactic foams containing microballoons of a wide range of wall thickness and volume fraction. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.