Experimental Investigations on Bending Collapse Modes of Innovative Sandwich Panels with Metallic Foam Core

The interest of engineering industries in sandwich structures is growing quickly in the last year’s cause of their intriguing properties coupled with the development of new materials and the need for high performance and low-weight systems. A sandwich construction consists of high performant outer skins that reinforce a lightweight inner core material; the formers provide the main load-carrying capabilities, while the core serves to transfer the load between the facings. Different results were proposed in the literature for the core material and structure. Among these, aluminium foams appear to be a potential solution to ensure lightness as well as relatively high mechanical performances. As for the skins, the commonly used reinforcement systems such as metals sheets and composite material plates, disagree with some of the requirements imposed by engineering companies. In particular, the formers are in contrast with the lightweight condition, while the latter tend to deteriorate slightly above room temperature, making it impossible to use them in some extreme environmental conditions, where high temperatures may be involved. Therefore, in this research activity, an innovative solution was proposed for the manufacturing of aluminium foam based sandwich panels, with stainless steel wire mesh-grid used as reinforced skin, by using the powder compact melting technique. The so manufactured samples were tested under three-point bending conditions. The collapse modes were analysed and compared with those reported in the literature in order to verify the effectiveness of the manufacturing method developed as well as the validity of the theoretical prediction models.