Elastic bending behavior of aluminum alloy foam

Aluminum alloy foam has been an attractive material to be used in many engineering applications due to its novel properties and behaviors in combination with the light-weight structure. Many researches had been conducted to enable and explore more widespread engineering applications of this material; however, its mechanical responses are yet to be fully understood. The work presented in this paper is aimed at studying the elastic bending behavior of aluminum alloy foam by experimental investigations and theoretical analysis. From the experiments, the measured flexural moduli are found to be significantly larger than the corresponding Young's moduli. Moreover, the foam's stiffness equation introduced by Ashby et al for the design-guide is found to be not suitable for estimation of the flexural moduli. The theoretical analysis was carried out to identify the mechanism responsible for generating the discrepancy. We found that the different in cell local-deformation under uniaxial loading and bending condition plays a prominent role in the discrepancy, where in particular, the effect of cell-face stretching was found to be dominant in bending condition.