Aerogel-epoxy resin syntactic foams: Processing parameters and compressive properties

Aerogels are extremely lightweight materials composed of almost 99.98 vol% of interconnected channels. These materials present excellent opportunities for developing ultra-lightweight composite materials. These materials can provide low density to the composite materials along with several special properties such as electrical insulation and controlled dielectric constant. Only partial success is achieved in efforts of fabricating aerogel-epoxy syntactic foams. Although, the size of porous channels is only a few nm in aerogel particles, infiltration of resin into these channels appears to be the main problem during fabrication of composites. Several processing parameters such as the temperature and viscosity of the resin are varied to facilitate better mixing and wetting. Most composite material specimens synthesized by this method contain density in the range of 800-1100 kg/m ³. Compression tests have been conducted on these materials and their deformation and fracture behavior is studied. Better control over the processing parameters needs to be achieved to obtain composites containing density in the desired range of 400-500 kg/m ³.