Hot Metal Gas Forming of Closed-Cell Aluminum Foam Sandwich Panels
- PDF / 1,311,105 Bytes
- 8 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 65 Downloads / 195 Views
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Hot Metal Gas Forming of Closed-Cell Aluminum Foam Sandwich Panels Amir H. Roohi1 • Seyed Jalal Hashemi2
•
Majid Allahyari3
Received: 18 December 2019 / Accepted: 17 June 2020 Ó The Indian Institute of Metals - IIM 2020
Abstract Metal foams are an interesting group of lightweight materials, which have appropriate physical, mechanical, thermal, electrical and acoustic properties for various engineering applications. Currently, metal foams are often manufactured in the shape of its final geometry through the casting process and by applying foaming agents. As a result, their use is limited in the complex geometries. In this paper, the forming of square aluminum foam sandwich panels at elevated temperatures is investigated, when applying gas pressure. These sandwich panels have two upper and lower layers of aluminum sheet and a mid-layer of closed-cell aluminum foam. The effect of process parameters, including gas temperature and pressure and process time, on the sandwich panel products has been experimentally investigated. The results show that if the temperature is increased, the failure is postponed, and less pressure is required. Furthermore, at higher temperatures and pressures, the bulged sections of the sandwich panel experience a noticeable local thinning percentage. Keywords Hot metal gas forming Aluminum foam Elevated temperatures Sandwich panels Experimental study
& Seyed Jalal Hashemi [email protected] 1
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Industrial and Mechanical Engineering, Qazvin Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qazvin, Iran
2
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Enghelab-e Eslami, Tehran Branch, Technical and Vocational University (TVU), Tehran, Iran
3
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Kar Higher Education Institute, Qazvin, Iran
1 Introduction Aluminum foam sandwich panels have a central porous core (i.e., aluminum foam core) surrounded by aluminum sheets on both sides. These panels with high strength-toweight ratio are suitable for vibration and sound absorption, thermal insulation and impact absorption applications [1]. In many applications, these panels are designed as a non-flat piece with various 3D curves. For example, the sandwich panels are used as impact absorbers in the car bumper, which have complex 3D non-flat geometry [2]. On the other hand, hot metal gas forming (HMGF) is a novel forming process that has been used to form metal sheets and pipes in recent years, especially aluminum and magnesium sheets [3]. In this process, punch is replaced with the gas pressure for applying deformation forces to the sheet, as compared with the conventional stamping process. There is no temperature limit in the use of gas, and the process temperature could be increased to any desired value [4]. The gas might be air and nitrogen or inert gases such as argon. With increasing process temperature, the forming force and required gas pressure for plastic deformation decrease [5]. So far, many studies have been carried out on the HMGF process
Data Loading...
