Preparation And Mechanical Property Study Of Aluminum Foam And Foam-filled Structure

In the paper, the aluminum foam, which had evenly distributed bubble and good mechanical property, was prepared by melt foaming technique and the preparing process and the influence of experiment parameter were analyzed. The foam-filled thin-walled tube was fabricated by aluminum tube as its shell and aluminum foam as its core.The compression and tension properties of aluminum foams were studied. The results indicated that the compression deformation mechanism of aluminum foam was layer-by layer collapse. The tensile Young's modulus was proportional to the square of relative density and the tensile strength was proportional to relative density of aluminum foams.Longitudinal and transverse compression properties and energy absorption properties of foam-filled tubes were studied. The results indicated that the deforming mode of foam-filled tube and empty tube was symmetry folding mode, but the number of folds was more than that of empty tube. The longitudinal compression load and energy absorption value of foam-filled square tube were higher than the sum of that of aluminum foam (alone) and empty tube (alone) due to the interaction effect between tube and filler. In transverse direction, the compressive load and energy absorption value of foam-filled tube were lower than the sum of foam (alone) and tube (alone),the compression load and energy absorption ability of foam-filled tube were significantly lower than that in longitudinal direction.The bending property of partially foam-filled tubes was studied. The results indicate that the bending load and absorbed energy of partially foam-filled tube significantly increase and the deformation mode changes from single-fold model to multi-fold model when compared with empty tube. Compared with fully foam-filled tube, not only does the bending load of partially foam-filled tube increase, but also the total weight of the structure drops. Only when the filling length is longer than the efficient filling length, the bending load of the aluminum tubes filled with foam increases rapidly. The relatively increasing value of load increases with the decrease of wall thickness of aluminum tube and span.The tensile property, compression property, bending property of samples increased with the decrease of aluminum foam porosity.