The fracture toughness of PVC/GRP sandwich systems in marine environment

The aim of this Study is to investigate experimentally the fracture toughness of sandwich systems with the PVC foam core in marine environment with a Mode-I Cracked Sandwich Beam (CSB) test arrangement. Five CSB specimens at each condition were tested. To get the values under marine environment, one set of specimen was conditioned in a 5% solution of NaCl for a 120 h period at a constant temperature of 50 degrees C. It has been found that the fracture toughness of the PVC foam core material slightly increases under marine environmental conditions. It can be concluded that under the conditions in this study the system with the PVC core was largely unaffected by the immersion process