Fly-ash cenosphere/clay blended composites for impact resistant tiles

摘要

In this paper, blended fly-ash cenospheres/clay composites are explored as potential material for roofing tiles. In view of impact on roofs during hailstorms, the goal is to improve the impact resistance of roofing tile materials. It is hypothesized that the impact damage resistance of tiles can be improved while reducing their densities by incorporating hollow fly-ash cenospheres with base clay. Towards that, four types of composites, namely clay, clay + filler, clay + fly-ash and clay + filler + fly-ash are fabricated and evaluated under dynamic impact loading with 1 J impact energy. Changes in microstructure, densities and degree of damage in the four types of composites are compared. The addition of fly-ash cenospheres appears to improve the structural integrity of the tiles by reducing gaps observed in clay tiles. The highest reduction in density is observed in clay + fly-ash composites of approximately 36% as compared to clay samples. Whereas, a reduction in the degree of damage of about 22% and 26% are observed in clay + fly-ash and clay + filler + fly-ash specimens, respectively. Even though clay + filler and clay + filler + fly-ash manifested higher peak forces and lower degree of damage than clay + fly-ash composite, the reduction of densities are only 3.48% for clay + filler and 29.85% for clay + filler + fly-ash. Therefore, a combined consideration of degree of damage and density of composites reveals that clay + fly-ash composites are superior as compared to clay and other composites investigated in this study. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.