humans have been using composite materials for thousands of years. Take mud bricks for example. A cake of dried mud is easy to break by bending, which puts a tension force on one edge, but makes a good strong wall, where all the forces are compressive. A piece of straw, on the other hand, has a lot of strength when you try to stretch it but almost none when you crumple it up. But if you embed pieces of straw in a block of mud and let it dry hard, the resulting mud brick resists both squeezing and tearing and makes an excellent building material. Put more technically, it has both extremely good compressive strength and tensile strength. Strength is determined by how much weight a material can support or how much stress it can withstand. Compressive strength is the maximum stress that a material will bear when it is subjected to a load that pushes it together. Tensile strength is the maximum stress a material will bear when it is subjected to a stretching load.
Sandwich Design
Laminates thickness: 3 + 3 mm
Core thickness:
60 mm
|
Concept |
Relative bending stiffness |
Actual weight (kg/m2) |
Relative weight |
|
Steel |
100% |
192 |
100% |
|
Sandwich |
100% |
23 |
12% |
WHAT ABOUT THE STRENGTH OF COMPOSITE
What makes a material a composite?
Steel Plate
Plate thickness: 24 mm