Flexural behaviour of sustainable alternatives for surfboard sandwich composite manufacture

Engineering of Sport 15 - Proceedings from the 15th International Conference on the Engineering of Sport (ISEA 2024)

High-quality surfboards are sandwich composite structures of polyurethane (PU) or expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam core wrapped in an E-glass fibre-reinforced polymer laminate. Existing research on surfboard materials focuses on PU surfboards, despite EPS surfboards increasingly gaining interest within the surf industry. Only one project has explored the material properties of EPS-core sandwich structures for surfboards. This paper investigates the flexural behaviour of alternative materials currently marketed as sustainable and proposes novel materials to implement in surfboard manufacture. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study assessing and comparing the mechanical properties of these sustainable material options for surfboard applications.