Compressive behaviour of aluminium matrix syntactic foams reinforced by iron hollow spheres

•Low pressure infiltration is suitable to produce MMSFs with hollow iron spheres.•The MMSFs showed plastic yielding and long, slowly ascending plateau region.•The matrix and the heat treatment strongly influence the properties of the MMSFs.•The full-scale FEM model gives excellent agreement compared to the measured values.

Aluminium alloy syntactic foams reinforced with iron hollow spheres were produced by low pressure, liquid phase inert gas infiltration technique. Four Al alloys (Al99.5, AlSi12, AlMgSi1 and AlCu5) and Globomet grade iron hollow spheres were used as matrix and reinforcing material, respectively. The produced composite blocks were characterised according to the ruling standard for compression of cellular materials in order to ensure full comparability. The compressive test results showed plastic yielding and a long, slowly ascending plateau region that ensures large energy absorption capability. The proper selection of the matrix material and the applied heat treatment allows for a wide range of tailoring of the mechanical properties. For design purposes, the full-scale finite element method (FEM) model of the investigated foams was created and tested on Al99.5 matrix foams. The FEM results showed very good agreement with the measured values (typically within 5% in the characteristic properties and within 10% for the whole compression curve).

Graphical abstractFigure optionsDownload full-size imageDownload as PowerPoint slide