Polymer foams, when combined with Carbon or Glass fibre reinforcement plastic factsheets, are becoming widely used in structural applications. In the marine industry, polymer foams are often specified for dynamically loaded regions of the boat, such as forward hull slamming regions. Understanding how and when these materials fail is critical to developing an understanding of design allowables and comparative performance between different foams. This project would look at how foam behaves in dynamic loading scenarios, compared with static loading scenarios and how traditional failure analyses can be applied to them to predict their performance. This project would involve some experimental testing as well as numerical modelling using ABAQUS. This project ties in with industry partner Gurit (NZ) as well as an existing US Office of Naval Research funded program underway at the Centre for Advanced Composite Materials.
Undergraduate
None
Lab allocations have not been finalised