Flexural Behaviour of Indigenous Natural Rubber Cored Novel Sandwich Structure-An Experimental Approach

Smart structures are very significant in several engineering applications because of their wide variety of applications, capability to withstand varying loads, escalations of elastic loading when compared to several other structures. One of those smart type structures is sandwich structures that are generally light in weight, having higher stiffness, and easy to manufacture. Also it is used in numerous applications, viz., aerospace, automobile, building construction, marine structures, bio-medics, etc. The present article studies with fabrication of sandwich beam having natural rubber (NR) as the core material, resulting development of a novel Natural Rubber Cored Sandwich Beam (NRCSB). Along with this, flexural performance of the developed sandwich panel (SwP) have been studied with the different thickness of AI5083-H112 skins. A maximum flexure stresses has been determined to be 20.566, 51.474 and 89.033 MPa for 1 mm, 3 mm and 5 mm, respectively. NRCSBs has also shown better elastic performance under three points loading condition and experimental results have been found in well agreement with theoretical one. The instant study has been concluded that the mechanical impersonating factor of NR leads to an improved overall behaviour of NRCSBs.