Characterisation of Strength Behaviour of Aluminium Foam Sandwiches Under Static Load

Abstract

Cellular metals, particularly aluminium foams, are increasingly used in automotive, railcar and aircraft industries due to their advantages such as low density, comparatively high stiffness, noise damping or non‐flammability. From this point of view a new powder‐compact forming and foaming technique has been developed to manufacture 3D‐aluminium foam sandwich (AFS) parts for components of railcars without glued joint between the foamed core layer and both cover sheets. Three different stages of foam expansion have been analysed to describe the material properties. We have characterised samples made of plane AFS panels by compression, bending and shear tests. The shear strain is optically measured by digital image correlation to estimate the shear modulus of foamed sandwiches. Furthermore, these experimentally determined values and curves are the basis for the verification and optimisation of finite element models by design of experiments. As a result of this work, recommendations could be derived for improving technological parameters.

Mechanical Respond and Failure Mode of Large Size Honeycomb Sandwiched Composites under In-Plane Shear Load

“…Honeycomb sandwich composite structure is a special type of composite material composed of two stiff face sheets bonded to a very lightweight honeycomb core [1]. The face sheets could be a natural or synthetic fiber reinforced composite [2,3,4,5] or metal [1,6] and the core could be replaced as polymer foam [4,5] or aluminum foam [1,6,7]. This provides the possibility for the engineer to widely change the parameters to meet the design specifications.…”

“…This provides the possibility for the engineer to widely change the parameters to meet the design specifications. Due to its high specific stiffness and strength, excellent energy absorption capacity, good noise resistance, as well as high damping properties, the sandwich composite structure has been widely used in the aerospace field [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. The mechanical properties of the sandwich composite structure are highly anisotropic with more failure modes, and the processing technology and structural characteristics of composite materials are more complex than traditional materials, especially alloy materials [12,13,14,15,16].…”