Effects of Seawater Immersion on Compression Properties of Cork and Balsa Woods

Today, a wide range of natural and synthetic materials is employed as core in sandwich structures for weight critical applications such as for high-speed craft structures. Water absorption is greatly undesirable in these applications. The present work evaluates the influence of seawater immersion on two kinds of core materials, namely, balsa wood and agglomerated cork. Agglomerated cork is one of the new products of natural cork core that is recently under feasibility study to utilize in certain new structural applications. Designers of high-speed crafts commonly specify core materials for marine sandwich structures. In this study, two types of above said core materials were exposed to seawater immersion to find out the relative resistance to property change. Core specimens were studied for weight gain and compression properties after seawater immersion and the results were compared with those of dry core specimens