Experiment And Numerical Simulation For Aluminum Foam Sandwich On Three-Point Bendin

Aluminum foam is a new structural functional material. It is widely applied in the field of aerospace, machinery, automotive and building decoration due to its special property of low density, high specific strength, high damping, sound absorption and energy absorption. Generally, aluminum foam is used as a filler of the structure to reduce the quality and increase the carrying capacity and the energy absorption capacity. In this paper, the three-point bending experiments and numerical simulation studies of aluminum foam sandwich panels are carried out.This paper mainly contains following parts:Part1. The various experiments of aluminum foam,5052aluminum alloy panel and aluminum foam sandwich panels are performed, including the monotonic compression and monotonic tensile on aluminum foam; monotonic tensile and three-point bending on5052aluminum alloy panel; and three-point bending for aluminum foam sandwich panels. The failure modes of aluminum foam sandwich panels are observed. The influence of the core layer thickness and panel thickness on the carrying capacity of sandwich panels are studied.Part2. Based on the experiment, the finite element model for bonding sandwich panels under three-point bending is developed by FE software ABAQUS. The bonding layer is described by the cohesive zone model. The debonding between the face sheet and the core of aluminum foam, a typical failure mode of aluminum foam sandwich panels under three-point bending, is simulated reasonably. The numerical results show a good agreement between simulated responses and experimental results. Furthermore, the influence of the thickness of face sheet and the core of aluminium foam on bearing force and energy absorption capacity is analyzed. It is shown that the increasement of core thickness can provide higher bearing force and energy absorption capacity of aluminum foam sandwich panels.Part3. Aluminum foam is a typical bimodulous material. The different elastic moduli are adopted in tension and compression zone to study the influence of the elastic moduli. The simulated results of void model with bimodulous characters are compared with that of the crushable foam model without bimodulous characters. It is shown that the elastic moduli of aluminum foam core has great influence on the three-point bending behavior of aluminum foam sandwich panels. If the bimodulous effects of aluminum foam are neglected, the simulated loading stiffness and yield load are obviously lower than that with bimodulous effects for the three-point bending behavior of aluminum foam sandwich panels.Part4. Based on a constitutive model of metallic foams proposed by Deshpande and Fleck, a ABAQUS user subroutine is developed to simulate the monotonic compressive properties of aluminium foam. It lays the foundation for the follow-up study of aluminum foam constitutive relationships.