The Influence Wall Thickness of Cement Hollow Spheres towards Compressive Properties of Cement Syntactic Foam

摘要

An innovative technique in producing cement syntactic foam (CSF) was proposed in this investigation. This cellular composite material basically consists of a cement matrix embedded with in-house developed cement hollow spheres (CHS). The produced foams incorporated with CHS having different wall thickness, were characterized for compressive strength and then compared with that of plain cement. It was observed that the CSFs were 37%-55% lighter than the plain cement but possessed compromised compressive strength. The comparative compressive properties of CSFs were also evaluated and reported. It was found that the CSF incorporated with thicker-coated CHS showed higher compressive strength compared to that of incorporated with thinner-coated CHS. The failure patterns within the test samples were also examined to determine the failure mechanism. These observations showed that both CSFs exhibited shearing type failure but exhibit different types of crack fractures due to the difference in CHS wall thickness.