Preparation of Aluminum Foam Sandwich Reinforced by Steel Sheets

Aluminum foam sandwich (AFS) possesses excellent performance of light weight, high specific strength and stiffness, impact resistance, etc., which can be widely used in rail transit vehicles, aviation and aerospace industry and military field. In this paper, the bonding tests between steel sheets and aluminum foam have been done. In the tests, steel sheets pretreated by hot dipping were chosen as the reinforcement and a foamable precursor compacted by powder metallurgy as the core. The three-layer composite was connected by hot pressing and the aluminum foam sandwich was prepared by the later heating quickly. The results showed that the steel sheets coated by Zn-55 wt.%Al alloy can be combined with the foamable precursor by liquid phase diffusion welding. The AFS with diffusion bonding interface can be also obtained by baking in furnace.