Composite hollow core high-end bio-panels

With growing environmental concerns and increasing competition, any future development of product and process should strive to reduce material consumption, minimise emissions, and consume less energy. The structural sandwich panels discussed in this study are an attempt to develop products that can achieve those requirements. The reinforced cores manufactured in this study were mechanically superior to unreinforced PP cores, providing an improvement in specific strengths and moduli greater than two fold. Moreover, with the fibre alignment during extrusion, it was possible to align the principal direction of the fibres in the loading direction, increasing stiffness in the cell walls and hence the load carrying capacity of the cores. Additionally, based on the principle of resonance, by varying the core and face sheet thicknesses, sound absorbance at desired frequency could be anticipated. The energy absorption experiments revealed that the cores could be compressed to over 80% of their initial heights exhibiting long plateau with more or less steady stress, thus making them applicable as energy absorbers if they were to be considered for packaging applications. The production of wood-strand sandwich panels using the matched-die mould design in this study could manufacture panels with 40% of the materials required to produce a solid panel of same thickness. This would also significantly reduce the petroleum-based resin consumption accounting to over 25% of the production costs. These panels exhibited significantly greater stiffness values than solid OSB panels using the same amount of constituent materials due to the 88% increase in specific bending stiffness.