Flexural behaviour of indigenous natural rubber cored novel sandwich structure- An experimental approach

Abstract

Smart structures have become very significant in several engineering applications due to their wide variety of applications, ability to withstand varying loads, escalations of elastic loading compared to other structures etc. One of those smart type structures is sandwichtructures that are generally light in weight, having higher stiffness, and easy to manufacture. Also it is used in numerous applications, viz., aerospace, automobile, building construction, marine structures, bio-medics, etc. The present article deals with fabrication of sandwich beam with natural rubber (NR) as the core material, resulting development of a novel Natural Rubber Cored Sandwich Beam (NRCSB). Along with this, flexural performance study of the developed sandwich panel (SwP) with the different thickness of AI5083-H112 skins was done and maximum flexure stresses was found to be 20.566, 51.474 and 89.033 MPa for 1 mm, 3 mm and 5 mm, respectively. NRCSBs also showed better elastic performance under three points loading condition and experimental results were found to be in well agreement with theoretical one. The present study concluded that the mechanical impersonating factor of NR leads to an improved overall behaviour of NRCSBs.