Aluminium foam sandwich structures for space applications

Within a French/German research project the suitability of a new class of materials, so-called aluminium foam sandwiches (AFS), was tested for space applications. While classical sandwich materials require particular, cost and time intensive processing techniques, AFS are suitable for mass production technologies as they are known from car industry and the like. Thus, it is expected that such materials could essentially contribute to cost reduction in space.In order to test the principal applicability and to gain some first experience in how the manufacture of AFS space components could work, a cone 3936 as used in Ariane 5 was chosen as demonstrator.In the forefront, the material had been intensively tested considering mechanical and thermal properties. By means of FEM the results of these experiments were used to simulate the behaviour under load and to optimise the design accordingly.Using AFS suitable production methods, the cone was built and tested simulating the loads during launch. The test results were compared to the predictions made by FEM and showed good agreement.