Investigation of mechanical properties of silicone syntactic foam for outdoor applications

Silicones are especially suitable as insulation materials in outdoor applications and state of the art as coating and shed materials. However, composite insulators can still be improved with regard to weight and cost reduction by adding cost-efficient, light weight filling materials. In this work hollow microspheres (HMS) are applied, which influence a broad range of material properties such as mechanical properties. Therefore, investigations regarding mechanical properties (tear and tensile strength, elongation at break) of the resulting composite material are performed to identify suitable material compositions.