Investigation On Mechanical Behavior Of Aluminum Foam Sandwich Structure Under Cyclic Load

Aluminium foam materials exhibit many unique characteristics in mechanical, electromagnetic, and acoustic properties and have been widely used in many areas as aerospace industry, building structure, marine technology and automotive engineering. Metallic foams are rarely used as engineering structures, they often appear as the core of sandwich structures due to its reshaped-easily. Many research focus on the mechanical behavior of Aluminium foam materials and their sandwich structures under static and impact loadings. However, in practical engineering applications, aluminium foam sandwich structures are designed to carry cyclic loading.The aim of this paper was to study the mechanical behavior under cyclic loading of aluminium foam cored sandwich beams based on experimental work and theoretical analysis. The main work and research results present as follow,1 Experimental study was done on mechanics performance of aluminium foam sandwich structures under static three-point-bending loads. Ratio of thickness to span of aluminium foam sandwich beam and its effect on its limited loading and the capacity of energy absorption has been investigated experimentally. The failure modes of structure are analyzed. The optimization of structure design is given based on considering of its capacities of load and energy absorption.2 A new device was designed and produced, which can be well performed cyclic three-point-bending loads on aluminium foam sandwich beams. Fatigue testing of sandwich structure under cyclic loading have been carried out. The influence of size parameters on fatigue life was investigated accordingly. Modes of failure and the stiffness degradation were employed for fatigue evaluation in this paper. The experimental results show that the cyclic life of sandwich structure decreases with the increase of ratio of thickness to span.3 Fatigue behaviors of aluminium foam sandwich beam with steel panel under three-point bending cyclic loading were also investigated experimentally. The results show the fatigue life of steel panel sandwich structures is longer than that of aluminium panel sandwich beams, but the structure failure mode was indeterminate in our research work.