Engineering Applied Research Of Foam Aluminum Materials

It has been more than 50 years since the appearance and application of the foam metal materials. However, attentions are paid to researches on mechanical behavior and destruction mechanism of the foam metal materials only in recent years. Among researches on foam metal materials, foam aluminum is the emphasis.Factors that affects mechanical performances of foam metal materials are mainly two: one is the intrinsic properties of the substrate materials, the second are factors such as geometry of the materials, shape of the foam cells and relative density, etc.This paper introduces theoretical systems of foam metal, analyzes the compressive deformation mechanical behavior and deformation mechanism. Based on a series of static compressing and free-falling hammer tests of different substrate materials, different cell rates and composite structures, results on energy absorption performance of foam aluminum and aluminum-copper alloy, as well as results on energy absorption efficiency of actual tests and ideal one, are obtained. Analysis indicates that, foam aluminum and aluminum-copper alloy are both good energy absorption materials; when comparing with each other, energy absorption performance of the former is better than that of the latter. Experiments reveal that, when fragile foam materials are employed as energy absorption materials, adding of steel shell will notably increase energy absorption; while for plastic foam materials, this method doesn't obviously help.This paper also describes microscopic mechanical behavior of foam metal materials phenomenologically by means of combination of experiments and numerical simulation, simulates dynamic and static response of foam aluminum structures by means of FEM, and simulates large deformation elastic-plastic behavior of foam aluminum structure under static and dynamic loads with accuracy. Simulation based on model tests indicates that: the Bikhu/Dubois foam model is able to describe the static and dynamic (below 10~3/s) microscopic constitutive behavior of the foam aluminum.