Particle-to-particle interactions in syntactic foams

This work studies the elastic interaction between a pair of hollow particles embedded in a dissimilar medium and subjected to a remote uniaxial tensile loading. The Boussinesq-Papkovich stress function approach is integrated with a multi-pole series expansion to establish a tractable semi-analytical solution of the Navier-Cauchy equation. Results specialized to glass-vinyl ester syntactic foams show that neglecting interactions among particles in the modeling scheme generally result into underestimation of the stiffness and overestimation of the strength. Moreoever, it is found that particle wall thickness can be used to control the intensity of particle-to-particle interactions and their effects on the response of the composite.