Structural Honeycomb - FC

View Product Data Sheet

Nida-Core FC
(1 to 4.5 lbs/Ft3 densities)

Nida-Core FC ( for Flexible Core) is a extra resilient continuous honeycomb product, able to be configured and engineered to suit the end user's requirements. Nida-Core FC can be made from virtually any thermoplastic material - from polypropylene, polyethylene, poly carbonate to many others in non woven or film form. The FC is manufactured, using a patented 3D stacking system by means of thermal bonding, up to 100mm thick and up to 1250 mm in width, and as long as necessary. Thermal bonding means there are no glues or other additives in the process, making the product 100% recyclable and environmentally friendly.

Applications

In general, applications for this product fall into at least one or more of the following areas:
structural, separation, fluid transport and energy absorption.
It is possible for an application to require or use all of these functional areas while some may require only one. Since the nature of the nonwoven is drastically altered, i.e., it is in a third dimension, its intellectual property potential is also drastically altered as well, and many new defensible areas become available from the same starting material.

Nida-Core FC

APPLICATION	Key Property
Fluid Movement	Separation, Fluid transport, Laminar flow
Panel	Structural, Separation, Light weight
Gravel Replacement	Ease of Use, Structural, Separation, Fluid transport
Flooring	Non absorbing underlay, Energy absorption, Separation
Erosion control	Structural, Separation , Fluid transport
Protection(sports, industrial)	Separation, Energy absorption
Seating	Engineered resilience, Structural, Separation

Fc Honeycomb

H 55 and H110 are shipped unexpanded, greatly reducing the cost of shipping to the end user.

Port St. Lucie, Oct 30, 2009

Composite Solutions come down to Earth!

Honeycomb materials have been used in composite material structures for Aerospace applications to achieve remarkable structural performance compared with weight. Presently, Civil Engineers are learning to adopt honeycomb structures for soil stabilization and erosion control, providing both cost and environmental advantages.

For composite material specialists, when asked how honeycomb is used in FRP structures, most of us would site the use in Aerospace applications for Aircraft and Satellites. In these examples, honeycomb of aluminum or fire resistant aramid fibers are incorporated into sandwich structures with skin materials using high tensile carbon fibers and high performance epoxy resins. These structures define the highest state of composite material performance, demonstrating a ratio of stiffness versus weight above all others. Of course, the costs associated with these materials plus processing via prepregs and autoclaves have also been comparably stratospheric, and some cynics have used the term “cost is no object engineering.”

In recent decades, we have witnessed the large scale adoption of honeycomb structures based upon lower cost materials and processing techniques using glass fibers and ambient curing resins. While these composite structures are substantially less expensive to produce than their aerospace counterparts, they nonetheless provide exceptionally high performance ratios of stiffness to weight, and are now commonly specified for many diverse applications including transportation vehicles, marine vessels, and increasingly for building and construction articles.

While composite material engineers habitually think of using honeycomb as a core between FRP skins, Civil Engineers have come to adopt honeycomb structures in a completely different manner. Rather than using the honeycomb as a low density spacer filled only with air, they are increasingly specifying honeycombs as a structure to retain soil and gravel. Instead of using the honeycomb to resist compression loads by column loading of the cell structure, the cell walls are instead used to stabilize the displacement of granular materials so that a filled cell provides substantially higher compressive resistance than the unconstrained material could itself.

If you have ever ridden a bicycle of pushed a wheel chair over a pea gravel path or worse the beach, you realize the increasing rolling resistance as the wheel displaces material and sinks from the surface. But when those same granular materials have lateral movement constrained by a honeycomb cellular structure, they retain a compression property as high as concrete, and rolling resistance remains at a stable and low level. Until recently, this simple mechanism for dramatically changing the performance of soils by incorporation of honeycomb has seen only relatively modest application while our predilection for the use of concrete has continued unabated.

Nonetheless, several factors have combined to increase awareness of the benefits of using honeycomb structures in Civil Engineering applications particularly for soil stabilization. This includes interest in maintaining ground permeability for avoiding rain water run-off, as well as protecting soils from erosion. But it also includes avoiding the costs and energy use associated with quarrying and transporting additional fill materials and most particularly an interest in avoiding the use of concrete.

Perhaps no factor is more compelling than the introduction of environmental rating systems including in the USA of LEEDS, (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) and the Green Building Rating System. These types of ratings becoming common in many countries are intended to “encourage and accelerate global adoption of sustainable green building and development practices through the creation and implementation of universally understood and accepted tools and performance criteria.” For Architects and Civil Engineers, these ratings are changing the way in which material alternatives are considered. In particular, the true cost of concrete is substantially higher when the high energy content of production and transport are considered, as well as end of life disposal.

The first large scale demonstration of the use of honeycomb for soil stabilization is most often credited to the US Army Corps of Engineers. Patents were granted for a method of joining heavy gage plastic sheet into honeycomb by ultrasonic welding. In the 1980’s they demonstrated the ability to use honeycomb to transform sand into roads with sufficient stability to permit transport of military vehicles and in the 1990 war termed “Desert Strom”, millions of square feet of honeycomb were used for rapid construction of roads and fortified walls. The honeycomb is transported collapsed in high density, and easily expanded on site with a single pallet of material able to cover many thousands of square feet.

Presently, there are now many different commercial honeycomb product forms, from the large dimensions using heavy strips of Polyethylene Film as used by the Army Corps, to lighter weight versions using GeoTextile Grade Spunbond Polypropylene, and even some designs of Injection Molded patterns to create stackable trays with interlocking edge configurations. Hundreds of applications that have successfully demonstrated the use of honeycomb for soil stabilization have been developed, from highway embankments and beach erosion projects, to municipal parks and recreation facilities, and private drives and foot paths, and even green rooftops.

Honeycomb supports lawns so that golf carts may be used in the rain, or field parking during a public event can be permitted with minimal risk of damage to the terrain. In these cases the honeycomb produces with geotextile spunbond material may be preferred as it permits growth of plant roots and is porous to water, while any surface exposure presents little risk to mowing equipment as fibers may be separated without risk of extracting the remaining structure. In other cases the stackable designs have been used to transport and place sod that is grown into the support rather than extracted from fields in rolls.

Honeycomb may be used for playgrounds to retain and stabilize fill of natural mulch or shock absorbing recycled rubber products. It is also used to build the supporting underlayment for synthetic surface athletic fields, where flatness is critically specified but occasional use of emergency or maintenance vehicles must still be permitted. In the examples of underlayment applications including road construction, the use of honeycomb permits a reduced thickness of gravel required compared with standard methods, directly reducing the material and transportation costs associated with the project.

In other cases, using Honeycomb with gravel can avoid the use of concrete. In one example a pad used to support a water cistern constructed of composite panels, has been created using honeycomb and gravel in lieu of pouring concrete. Other examples include parking areas and carports, and walkways, and storm water drainage swales. One big advantage is when there is an interest in removing or changing location of the pad or walkway, as the honeycomb may be easily withdrawn and the gravel can then be easily removed and reused.

Not all of the above cases will the reduction of required fill material be sufficient to recoup the cost of the honeycomb, but many do. Intrinsic benefits of slope retention, erosion control, and water drainage may be sufficient justification alone, and by most calculations honeycomb is less expensive than the alternatives. When the system permits the avoidance of concrete, however, installed costs alone can most often favor the use of honeycomb.

By stabilizing and retaining local or indigenous soils, the use of honeycomb can avoid or reduce the excavation, treatment, and transport of heavy materials. For Architects and Civil Engineers, this provides a solution for several issues both of installed cost and environmental consideration. By application of honeycomb structures in these new ways, they are literally bringing composite solutions down to earth!