Bending behavior of sandwich structures with different fiber facing types and extremely low-density foam cores

Abstract Sandwich structures offer innovative alternative solutions to many weight-critical industrial fields due to their lightweight and very high flexural rigidity compared to conventional materials. A vast number of sandwich configurations can be produced from a variety of materials for use as face sheets and core as well as matrix. Although there are many sandwich structures available in the literature to obtain the desired mechanical and physical properties, the usage of very low-density core materials is very limited. In this study, carbon and glass fiber fabrics having woven plain and ±45 ° fiber orientations and industrial PVC foam core having extremely low density of 40 kg × m−3 and 48 kg × m−3 were used for manufacturing the sandwich panels. Eight different configurations were constructed by hand lay-up followed by vacuum bagging. According to ASTM C393/C393M standard, the sandwiches were subjected to three-point bending (TPB) tests. After performing the TPB tests, the composite sandwich specim...