ANALYSIS ON IMPACT RESISTANCE OF ALUMINUM FOAM SANDWICH PANELS

An experiment including three aluminum foam sandwich panels with the thickness of 100 mm, 70 mm and 50 mm was designed. For each panel, drop hammer impacts of seven different heights of were carried out to acquire the deformation of the upper and lower panel, and to record the collapse process of the sandwich panel. The impact process was simulated by ANSYS/LS-DYNA, and the energy absorption ratio of the face-sheets and the core to the whole sandwich panel was derived. Based on the hypothesis of a theoretical model, the estimating formulae of the average impact load, local deformation and maximum total displacement were given. The results show that the local deformation is proportional to the square root of dropping height, while both the maximum global deformation and the average impact load have a linear relationship with the square root of the dropping height for the sandwich panel with fixed sizes and materials. The anti-impact property of the sandwich panel is mainly dependent on the increase of the deformation of the aluminum foam. The thicker the core layer is, the larger the proportion of foam aluminum absorption energy is, the smaller the local deformation is, and the greater the impact force of the sandwich panel is.