Surface Extension in Layered Structures with the Use of Metal Meshes for Heat-Transfer Enhancement

The properties of multilayer metal-fiber coverings superimposed on plane base layers, which consist of various combinations of a copper mesh and different-length copper wires, are examined. Coverings from discrete copper microwires, two-layer coverings including a mesh and microwires, and three-layer coverings consisting of a mesh and two layers of microwire are investigated. The contacts between the fibers, the copper mesh, and the base layer are analyzed by using the metallography technique. Quantitative estimates for these contacts are presented. The side effects connected with the hydrogen disease of copper are discussed. The thermal properties of the porous structures are analyzed with the use of a termographic chamber. It is shown that the porous metal-fiber structures have good mechanical and heat-transfer properties.     

Eigenfrequencies of radial vibrations of a spherical sandwich shell

Free across-the-thickness vibrations of a closed spherical shell consisting of three rigidly connected layers with arbitrary physical constants and thicknesses are studied. A closed-form solution in displacements to a one-dimensional (along the radius) vibration problem for a homogeneous spherical shell is derived and then used in posing a boundary-value problem on free vibrations of a heterogeneous sphere. Based on the degeneration of the sixth-order determinant of a system of homogeneous equations satisfying the corresponding boundary conditions, a transcendental equation for eigenfrequencies is found. Transformation variants for the equation of eigenfrequencies in the cases of degeneration of physical and geometric parameters of the compound shell are considered. The main attention in investigating the lowest frequency is given to its dependence on the structure of shell wall, whose parameters greatly affect the calculated values of the high-frequency vibration spectrum of the shell. Translated from Mekhanika Kompozitnykh Materialov, Vol. 44, No. 6, pp. 839–852, November–December, 2008.     

Experimental verification of some elastic properties of unidirectional composites

The first part of the paper deals with homogenization models of unidirectional composites, in which each phase of the material is bounded by parallel cylindrical surfaces. For a GFRP with epoxy resin and glass fibres, five elastic constants for six models of the composite are calculated. In the second part, the results of strain gauge tests, photoelasticity investigations, and scanning electron inspection are discussed. With these data, some elastic constants of the composite in tension and compression are found. A comparison of experimental and analytical results is presented. Russian translation published in Mekhanika Kompozitnykh Materialov, Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 195–206, March–April, 2008.