Effect of surface treatment on quasi-static compression and dynamic mechanical analysis of syntactic foams

Quasi static compression (10−1, 10−2 and 10−3 s−1 strain rates) and dynamic mechanical analysis (temperature sweep of 30–175 °C) of cenosphere/epoxy syntactic foams are investigated. Effect of cenosphere content (20, 40 and 60 vol %) and surface modification are presented. Quasi-static tests reveal lower modulus for neat epoxy samples as compared to all the syntactic foams. With increasing cenosphere content and strain rate, elastic modulus increases for all the tested conditions. Foams reinforced with surface modified cenosphere exhibit higher modulus as compared with untreated ones and neat epoxy. Energy absorption of samples increases with increasing cenosphere content and surface modification. Storage modulus of untreated and treated syntactic foams register higher values with increase in cenosphere content and are higher than the neat epoxy samples. Loss modulus of syntactic foams at room temperature are lower as compared with pure epoxy while damping of untreated and treated foams registered higher values as compared with neat resin. Scanning electron microscopy of the samples are performed for structure property correlations. Finally, property map for quasi-static compression is presented by comparing results of present work with the extracted values from literature.