Core Materials
Composites Canada offers a wide range of core materials designed to improve strength, stiffness, and weight reduction in composite structures.
Our selection includes foam, honeycomb, and balsa, all known for their excellent strength-to-weight ratios. When combined with composite skins, these materials create a sandwich structure that provides high stiffness and low weight, making them essential for aerospace, marine, automotive, and industrial applications.
By incorporating a core, the laminate’s section modulus increases, significantly enhancing stiffness while reducing weight. This sandwich structure acts like a continuous I-beam, where the composite skins bear the load, and the core maintains skin orientation, ensuring maximum durability and performance. Get the best core materials for your high-performance projects.
Our Core Material Selection
Balsa
Balsa is the most widely used core material, and is best suited for dynamic structures where performance and efficiency are key.Sheets are constructed from small individual blocks of end grain balsa wood, each bonded to a light scrim fabric that holds blocks together during lamination. As a result, this core will conform to practically any simple curve and most gradual compound curves.
Foam
Foam cores are one of the most inexpensive and easy to work with core materials. These foams are often used as a structural sandwich core for weight-sensitive aircraft and automotive applications. They combine ultra-low weight, improved stiffness, and impact resistance. Our foams are specifically designed for use as a core material and exhibit excellent mechanical properties when used in this way.
Honeycomb
We stock various types of honeycomb cores that are used extensively in the aerospace and transportation industry. The physical properties vary to a large degree with the specific material and density. Fabrication of extremely lightweight panels is possible with honeycomb cores.
Laminate Bulkers
Various materials are used to produce the products that are called either core fabrics or laminate bulkers. The purpose of these products is to create a barrier to prevent print-out or to build laminate thickness quickly. In most cases, core fabrics are non-woven materials using polyester filaments that are bonded into a mat-like blotter configuration. These products are wet-out with resin and laminated similarly to fiberglass reinforcement
Featured Suppliers
Gurit is a leading manufacturer and supplier of advanced composite materials, tooling automation, core kitting and composite structural engineering services.