Durability of flax-basalt hybrid composites for marine applications

The aim of the present work is to evaluate the influence of external layers of mat basalt on the durability behaviour and performances of flax/epoxy laminates. To this scope, long-term aging tests were performed to evaluate the durability of the two different laminates in critical environmental conditions. In particular, Flax composites were constituted by ten layers of bidirectional flax fabric whereas hybrid laminates (i.e. Flax-Basalt) were produced by replacing four external layers of bidirectional flax with four layers of basalt mat. Both laminates had a total average thickness equal to 3 mm. The samples were exposed to critical environmental conditions following the ASTM B 117 standar…