New board material may be well suited for Ship/Boat Building applications

Hi,

Just found your forum while looking for likely uses of our new board material recently developed called magnesiacore.

I would like people in the trade to take a look at it and let me know if there is a market for applications related to boat and shipbuilding and help get in touch with possible distributors in this industry.

Our website is www.magnesiacore.com.

My personal email is tony@magnesiacore.com

 

maybe you would like to post the engineering specs here. density, rupture and compression strengths, etc.

Guessing it is heavy.

 

We have some engineering data posted on our tests webpage including density ~980 KgM3 and compression ~20 MpA which we have so far as tests get done based on uses identified to date. Weight should be similar to the higher density particle wood materials, but we can use thinner material for equal uses and we can supply in millimetre increments from 3 to 20 so the end net weight needed needs to be worked out.

http://magnesiacore.com/tests.html

 

26% water absorbtion. Not a good thing for hull cores. The density is kinda heavy also. Not for my needs, but maybe someone else has an opinion.

 

You need some moisture absorption in order to make things stick easily to it. It should not be worse than plywood or wood in general. It has a slow absorption rate, so any coatings, resins and varnishes, etc., adhear very well to it. When you glue pieces together you can't pry them apart. Holds them better than wood.

The strength is high so thinner material can be used to achive a lower net weight.

 

Bump to top

 

Bump down

Weight reduction is the holy grail of boatbuilding.

Apart from the moisture absorbtion your material is simply to heavy to be of any serious use on a boat.

 

I gathered that concept which is what brought me here to discuss these possibilities.

Magnesiacore is 20MpA (3000PSI) which makes it as strong as concrete yet with our re-enforced glass fibre fabric inside the surfaces it acts like Steel Reinforced Concrete in strength and flexibility only at much thinner levels. You can't get much stronger than concrete with building materials unless you jump to steel which is much heavier and carbon composites which are way more expensive.

Since we can make board as thin as 3mm you can't get much better weight reduction and maximize strength ratio in an economically sensible board material.

 

Material properties

I was pissed because you posted a message to "bump to top" although i have to admit i like your honesty in putting only the words "bump to top" in it.

Compression strenght alone does not tell much about the usability in boatbuilding you need more data to make a comparison between existing materials.

All the other properties will have to be very good to compensate for the 26% moisture absoption, a bad property for boatbuilding.

 

Please feel free to request samples and let us know your opinions.

If we see enough interest and market in a particular use we will invest in the necessary testing and comparisons for these different uses.

The only reason to bump it up was to make sure people don't over look this thread and I can continue with these discussion with people in the relevant trade.

I was hoping for more discussion on a forum dedicated to boat design. If you can recomend any other trade forums like this please let me know.

Thanks

 

I see some use in flat bottomed scow barges, built here for living on. I'd like to get my hands on some samples 12mm & thinner. I could tell you for free about suitability. I won't buy a pallet of anything "new".
Save you money, buy some tubs. Fill them with water & do your own tests. Glue some various joint types usibg various adhesievs& sink them. Screws, nails, painted, unpainted, epoxyed, bare, weight before & after 6 months submerged etc. You will soon know what this stuff will do, for free.
If it passes simple destruction, absorbtion & strength, flex & bend tests then you will have to add another shift just to keep up with the demand here in S. Louisiana. Our "renewal plan" (hurricanes), keeps us hungry for weather resistant, water proof materials.

 

magnesiacore is used primarily a building material. Please request free samples from our website. Samples are 8"x8" in any thickness.

We don't have any going to Louisiana yet, though I have tried to make connections with local contractors and material distributors there. I guess they are all too busy knocking things down and putting them back up to look up for better new materials to use that might not need replacing so much.

 

Hi Tony,
If you're interested in getting into the marine market, I think a lot more tests are in order. The material looks very promising for land-based construction but a boat is a very different environment. A few things to consider:
Density- Balsa, CoreCell and Nomex honeycomb are all less than a quarter of the weight of Magnesiacore. How does the strength compare on a weight basis?
Water- Cores that can absorb water are not a good thing in boats. Forget one week exposure- try laminating the stuff into fibreglass, cracking that up a bit, and soaking it. Let it stay wet for months or years. Keep in mind that it took CoreCell over a decade to really catch on, once the stuff was known to hold up.
Fatigue- Unlike a building that sits pretty still, a boat hull can easily go through 10^7 or more fatigue cycles over its lifetime. It would be nice to know how the stuff holds up to this kind of abuse, especially in a water-saturated condition.
Other parameters- To integrate the stuff into a boat hull, a composites engineer would need to know the shear, compression and tensile moduli, yield strength, shear strength, ultimate strength, etc of the material in each of the three axes. He'd need to know how the material interacts with epoxy, polyester, vinylester, carbon fibre, and other common non-inert laminate materials. He needs tables of lab data- including details of the test methods used- not tables of marketing data.
The testing you'd have to do to convince the composites engineers and naval architects will take a long time and cost a lot of money. If you think you could be a serious player in the marine market, it'd be wise to spend the money on these tests, and prove how your product stacks up against the tried and true.

 

Thanks Marsh,

I appreciate your advice. That's exactly why I came here to find out if there is a market in marine uses.

The attraction is the strength, flexibility and weight.

Reinforced Concrete is one of the strongest building materials pound for pound, I'd heard that large ships have been made with reinforced concrete.

Magnesiacore is much lighter than concrete but has similar 3000 psi strength but it also much more flexible. One fellow used it for a skateboard "U" shape wall ramp (like you may see kids on TV doing stunts on, which kind of resembles the hull of a ship). It bends enough.

Some of it's main uses are for steamrooms and sauna walls in addition to other wet areas. Being salt resistent also helped make me think of uses in ships. But I have no experience in boat building or marine construction. Apart from knowing that marine plywood costs an arm and a leg. Magnesiacore is also very easy to laminate to itself so you can start with 3mm thick and build it up to any thickness.

 

Human bone is 6 times stronger than concrete and someone practising karate, takwon do or kung fu by braking brick's has bones that are 40-60 times stronger than concrete so what good bencmark is concrete?

None larg ships have ben made out off concrete as far as I know, I think it's only ben made a few smaler ones, but it really newer tok off.
I sen one once that was parked on land.
The icelantic people used to build some, but I regard it more *** smal boats than actualy large ships.

The data you post here is not werry usefull. What kind off tension can it take? a normal bolt at 8.8 qualety can take 68Nm/mm2 befour it start to float and 80Nm/mm2 befour it brake. Forces in all directions are interesting, strenght/compresion, flexing and stretching.