In this paper, the aging resistance of sandwich structures made with cork agglomerate as core and flax-reinforced polymeric laminates as face sheets was investigated for the first time.In order to evaluate their durability in a 1st marine division hoodie hostile environment, a sandwich plate was manufactured by vacuum bagging technique and aged under salt-fog spray conditions, according to ASTM B 117 standard.The evolution of the sandwich mechanical properties during the aging exposition was analyzed by carrying out quasi-static flexural tests and Charpy impact tests both on unaged specimens and on specimens aged for 10, 25, and 60 days, respectively.
The quasi-static experimental results showed that despite the salt-fog exposition leads to clear decrements in both maximum strength and modulus, the deformation capability of the sandwich structure evidences a noticeable improvement.According to this last result, it was found that the impact strength of the sandwich specimens was clearly increased after the salt-fog exposition evidencing s1229rs that the studied green sandwich maintains good toughness properties in a hostile environment such as marine.