Fabrication and characterization of expanded polystyrene/chopped glass fiber/epoxy novel composite

This study investigates the fabrication and characterization of a novel composite material that consists of expanded polystyrene beads as filler, chopped glass fibers as reinforcement and epoxy resin as matrix. Material samples were fabricated with vacuum infusion technique. Experimental studies were carried out at two stages. At the first stage, a bulk material was fabricated and three different types of specimens were cut to determine the material behavior when material is tested in different directions. At the second stage of the study, specimens with different ingredient ratios were fabricated. 14 different specimen types with varying parameters were fabricated, characterized and compared with neat resin. Experimental studies of first stage revealed that, the novel composite possess quasi-isotropic properties although it has non-homogeneous nature. The novel composite has significantly low density and thus considerably high specific modulus value. The second stage revealed that, the optimum fiber/filler ratio for the novel composite is 20:1. At higher ratio than 20:1, the increased clustering regions deteriorated the properties of the composite and caused high variation in results. The cost analysis showed that the expanded polystyrene/glass/epoxy composite have significantly high cost-property efficiency which means the novel composite is a good candidate for many engineering applications.