Impact behaviour of basalt fibre reinforced furan composites cured under microwave and thermal conditions

Basalt fibre reinforced furan composites were successfully manufactured by microwave technology. The samples were tested under instrumented falling weight impact loading and compared with conventionally cured ones. The microwave cured composites present higher values for ILLS (13.1%), delamination threshold force (5.2%), maximum load (17.8%) and penetration threshold (14.5%). The better impact performance of microwave curing composites is suggested to be due to its lower residual stresses and more homogeneous crosslinking induced by mass volumetric heating.