EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS OF ALUMINUM FOAM BEHAVIOR UNDER SHORT DURATION DYNAMIC LOADS

摘要

Aluminum foams are good energy absorbing materials. In order to test their behavior under short duration dynamic loads, some experiments were conducted in the new BGU Impact Facility of the Protective Technologies Research and Development Laboratory. The experiments were carried out using a large pendulum, which can generate energies and impact profiles, similar to those of blast waves. The aluminum foam panels were installed on a wall. Two types of foam were tested with a variety of loads controlled by the weight, height and the impactor of the pendulum. The behavior of the foams under these loads was characterized by measuring the accelerations and strains of the protected wall, the impact profile and the velocity of the pendulum. Numerical simulations of the experiments were done using the finite element method. The results of the experiments were used to validate and calibrate the simulation code, in order to use it for further experiments and development of protective structures using aluminum foams. The reported study includes details of both the experiments and simulation results.