A study on fracture characteristic of aluminum foam by thickness

Because foam metal has the excellent physical characteristics and mechanical performance, they are applied extensively into a lot of advanced technology areas. The aluminum foam with closed cell is one of the foam metals. It is applied widely into automobile and airplane because of the excellent absorption performance of impact energy. In this study, the mechanical characteristics by thickness was analyzed through the impact experiment of closed-cell aluminum foam, and the simulation analysis was performed for the verification. As the simulation analysis method, a finite-element analysis was carried under the same boundary conditions as the experiment by using ANSYS. By comparing with the results of experiment and simulation, it was thought that the case of thickness of 20 mm was the most efficient of among the cases of thicknesses of 10 mm, 20 mm and 30 mm. At the case of thickness of 20 mm, the absorption energy by comparing with the specimen thickness is shown to become the most among three models. By using the result of this study, it is thought that it can apply the material necessary to develop the mechanical structure with aluminum foam