The sandwich composites are used in general purpose and high-tech applications such aeronautics, sports and leisure (ski, bicycle, hockey), railway and road transport, elements of body for isothermal or cooled vehicles, nautical structural components, blades of wind turbines, thermal and phonic insulation in construction...
The core and the final parts can have any shape: parallelepipedic for a lot of sandwich panels, parts in shape for the hulls of boats or bumpers and so on.
Properties of the sandwich composites
These lightweight composites have a superior ratio stiffness/mass with excellent thermal and phonic insulating properties.
For example, if we consider:
* A compact laminate of e thickness,
* A sandwich panel made of two skins of thickness e/2 and a foam core of thickness 2*e,
The sandwich composite, for a slightly superior weight than the laminate, has a rigidity and a bending resistance several times superior to those of the compact laminates.
If one increases the thickness of the foam, the difference amplifies as we can see in the following table 1 taking as basis of reference a compact laminate.