Mechanical Behavior and Collapse Mechanisms of Innovative Aluminum Foam-based Sandwich Panels under Three-Point Bending

Recent studies on innovative solutions in structural engineering fields highlight the effectiveness of closed-cell aluminum foams as traditional material/architecture core replacement in sandwich structures. This study aims to investigate the mechanical behavior and the collapse modes of innovative sandwich panels with aluminum foam as the core and stainless steel wire mesh-grid as the skins; the manufacturing process was based on the powder compact melting technique. The results of quasi-static three-point bending tests point out the beneficial effects, in terms of mechanical performance, of the reinforcement skin on the sandwiches, compared to the plain foams; this joins by their effectiveness in withstanding thermal and mechanical loads. Moreover, the investigation of the collapse mechanisms of the sandwiches with different thicknesses allows for testing the goodness-of-fit of the experimentally observed collapses with the ones predicted by the failure map from analytical models available in the literature.