Mechanical and physical analysis on the effect of commercial aluminium mesh in fibre reinforced laminate structures

Yeap, Hong Kheng (2016) Mechanical and physical analysis on the effect of commercial aluminium mesh in fibre reinforced laminate structures. Project Report. Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka, Melaka, Malaysia. (Submitted)

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Abstract

Aluminium mesh has good resistance to corrosion and moisture absorption, low density, lightweight as well as cost efficient. However, most research did not utilize the aluminium mesh in the fabrication of hybrid polymer matrix composite. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effect on sandwiching the aluminium mesh in fibre reinforced laminate structure with specific design which was sandwiched aluminium mesh in alternate sequence and single aluminium mesh in specific stacking sequence in the composite laminate system. The designed hybrid laminated composites were fabricated via vacuum bagging technique where polyester resin, woven roving E-glass fibre and aluminium mesh were used as the matrix, primary reinforcement and secondary reinforcement material respectively. Mechanical and physical testing such as tensile, flexural, impact, hardness, areal density, water absorption and thickness swelling were carried out to determine the behaviour of aluminium mesh in different designs. Furthermore, the failure mode was studied by using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and optical microscopy. Generally, it was found that the ductility of aluminium mesh has made the hybrid laminated composite to behave in ductile manner, thus resulted in lower ultimate tensile strength, specific strength, Young’s modulus and stiffness. Despite the drop, the hybrid laminated composite has greater deflection and energy absorption upon testing by three point bending test and Charpy impact test. Besides, thickness of samples strongly affect the areal density and Shore D hardness properties where an increase in thickness leads to an increase in both of these properties. Other than that, shifting aluminium mesh from 7th position to 9th position showed good performance for most samples. In addition, gives better stiffness and hardness to the sample. Delamination, fibre pull-out and aluminium pull-out were the common failure mode found which can be explained by the interfacial bonding between the matrix and reinforcement materials. Hence, it can be concluded that as the amount of aluminium mesh layers increases, the sample resulted in better ductility. Additionally, the samples showed reduction in ductility when single aluminium mesh shifted from the middle layer to the bottom layer.

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