Comparison of Compressive Properties Between Va-cuum Infusion and Hand Lay-Up Method Toward Bal-sa Core Sandwich Composites

The aim of this work is to evaluate the influence of fabrication methods on the com-pressive properties of sandwich composites using both experimental work and numerical simulations. Two types of sandwich composites with E-glass/Kevlar/polyester resin facings and End-grain balsa wood as core have been produced by vacuum infusion processing (VIP) and hand-lay up (HL) method. Compression tests on sandwich composites showed that the mean values of compressive strength of HL and VIP composites are 15.02 MPa and 28.27 MPa, respectively. The performance of sandwich composites manufactured by VIP are presented and compared to the sandwich composites manufactured by HL method. Based on the experimental tests, VIP appears to produce higher results of sandwich composite compressive properties compared to the HL method. Consequently, in this work, the compressive properties of sandwich composites were characterized by finite element analysis (FEA) and a comparison of the compressive prop-erties in various fabrication methods was then presented. The correspondence between the predicted numerical results and the experiments proves the accuracy of this model.