Experimental and Numerical Investigation of the Effect of Embedding Steel Wires inside the Foam of GFRP/Foam Sandwich Panel under Three-Point Bending Load.

In this research, the effects of imbedding steel wires into the polyurethane foam of GFRP/Foam sandwich panel under three-point bending has been investigated. For this reason, three samples of non-reinforced, reinforced with two wires above and below and reinforced with three wires above and below the foam inside the GFRP sandwich panel were manufactured by vacuum bagging and tested under three-point bending in order to measure the specific strength of each sample. Moreover, a finite element model (FEM) was utilized using the Abaqus/Explicit package to further observe and analyze the stresses inside the samples. The results showed that imbedding steel wire inside the foam of the GFRP sandwich panel increased the bending strength by 25.2% in the two wire and 56.75% in the three-wire sample and bending modulus by 51.8% in two and 86% in three wire sample respectively. Since the weight of the wires with respect to the whole structure in negligible, the specific bending modulus of the sandwich panel was also improved by 21% in two and 44.8% in the three-wire sample. Finally, the results obtained from the experiments showed to have a decent agreement with the simulated model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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