Buckling and free vibration behavior of cenosphere/epoxy syntactic foams under axial compressive loading

Abstract

The buckling and free vibration behavior of cenosphere/epoxy syntactic foams under axial compressive loading are investigated experimentally in this work. The buckling load is obtained from the load-deflection curve based on the Double Tangent Method (DTM) and Modified Budiansky Criteria (MBC). Furthermore, the influence of an axial compression load on the natural frequencies associated with the first three transverse bending modes is analyzed. Finally, the buckling loads predicted using DTM and MBC are compared to the buckling load calculated based on the vibration correlation technique. It is observed that the buckling loads predicted through the three different methods are in close agreement. The experimental results revealed that the buckling load and natural frequency of the syntactic foams increase with the cenosphere volume fraction. It is observed that the natural frequencies reduce with increases in the axial compression load for all the modes. However, a rapid increase in the fundamental frequency is observed when the compressive load is near and beyond the critical buckling load. Copyright 2018 by ASTM International.