Simulation Modeling And Performance Analysis Of 3D Aluminum Foam Under Rolling Process

Aluminum foam is a new porous metal material,because of the merits that its light weight,sound-absorbing,reducing radiation,impact resistance,So it has a wide range of applications in automotive,aerospace,construction and shipping and other industries.However,due to its unique honeycomb structure,aluminum foam has low strength and rigidity.Therefore,metal plates need to be added to the upper and lower surfaces of the aluminum foam in the practical application.The research on the preparation technology and mechanical properties of aluminum foam sandwich panel has been paid close attention by scholars at home and abroad.Aluminum foam sandwich board is also called sandwich structure.Its unique structure makes it has excellent characteristics of porous structure and good rigidity and strength.However,because the upper and lower metal panels and aluminum foam core are connected together by physical or chemical means,the aluminum foam sandwich structure will easily be destroyed due to the metal panels fall from aluminum foam core to fall off with the deterioration of the service environment and the increase of the service life.Therefore,some scholars proposed that the upper and lower surface of aluminum foam core be formed into a dense layer by rolling method,so as to form aluminum foam sandwich structure.In this paper,the crack initiation trend of aluminum foam material during rolling process is studied,and the method of three-dimensional aluminum foam simulation model is proposed based on the model established by predecessors through computer numerical simulation,which provides a three-dimensional geometric model closer to the actual aluminum foam sandwich plate.The specific contents of this paper are as follows:The 3D model of aluminum foam with sphere random distribution is generated by MATLAB program and ANSYS software.The GUI user interface is designed to adjust the size,porosity,aperture range and minimum wall thickness of the model,which is more consistent with the real 3D structure of aluminum foam.The GUI user interface is designed through MATLAB program.The size,porosity,aperture range and minimum wall thickness of the model are adjusted in the interface,and the randomly distributed sphere language is generated in the set virtual cuboid model.The codes are imported into ANSYS to generate the randomly distributed solid sphere model.Because ANSYS is not good at modeling,the three-dimensional randomly distributed solid sphere model generated by ANSYS is imported into Rhino software.At this time,the model is composed of random spheres,and the union operation is performed on the assembly to make it a set.Then the virtual cuboid is materialized in Rhino software and imported into UG modeling software.There are two sets,three-dimensional random distribution solid sphere model and cuboid solid model.In UG,the three-dimensional foam aluminum model with random distribution of cell holes is generated after eliminating random distribution solid spheres from rectangular entities through Boolean operation.In the simulation process,by using the finite element software DEFORM,through theoretical analysis and finite element simulation,the rolling performance of aluminum foam is studied.The effects of different rolling amount,rolling pass number,rolling speed and rolling temperature on the rolling performance of foamed aluminum are studied.The results show that the damage factor,equivalent strain and equivalent stress at the edge of foamed aluminum are larger than those at the middle part.The increase of rolling temperature is helpful to reduce the defect of foamed aluminum.The aluminum foam model with randomly distributed holes is more suitable for real aluminum foam than the aluminum foam model with uniformly distributed holes.