A CFD Approach for Prediction of Unintended Porosities in Aluminum Syntactic Foam: A Preliminary Study

Aluminum Syntactic Foam (ASF) is a material with great potential in applications related to lightweight structures and structural damping. However, experimental investigations in literature report that the infiltration process to fabricate ASF often results in incomplete infiltration. Published studies on modeling the infiltration process are mainly based on a porous media/permeability approach. This approach focuses on the global porosity of ASF rather than local unintended porosity, since it does not include the infiltration pattern around the individual spherical particles. This paper reports a numerical approach that enables for the simulation of the flow through the porous corridors of the preform. The numerical approach is established in the commercial software FLOW-3D and consists of a finite volume based computational fluid dynamics solver and a volume of fluid algorithm which together calculates the pressure, velocity and free surface of the aluminum. The results of the numerical model illustrate that this method has great potential of predicting unintended porosities in ASF and thereby optimizing the parameters involved in the infiltration process.