A Statistical Approach to Thermal Shock Behaviour of Syntactic Foam

The failure characteristics of a syntactic foam made of hollow glass microspheres bounded by an epoxy resin matrix can be described by a Weibull statistical approach. A serie of tensile tests gave two Weibull parameters. It was checked that this approach allowed to predict the fracture strength of notched specimens as well as the fracture toughness KIC. In the case of a thermal shock, it can be shown that the time at which failure occurs is not only a function of the thermal characteristics of the material, but depends also on the Weibull exponent.