Metal foam lightweight structures bonded with fibre-reinforced plastics

While considering lightweight design, sandwich structures have become indispensable, especially when thinking of high bending stiffness. In general they consist of a low density material as core and two top layers which bear the load. Various sandwiches consisting of numerous of different material combinations are available. For instance honeycombs or polymer foams are widely used as core materials. One of the sub-projects of the Cluster of Excellence called MERGE deals with the research regarding a new material combination for sandwich structures. Hereby aluminium foam is used as the core and fibre reinforced thermoplastics are used as the top layers. Advantages of this combination are for example the high damping capability, the feasibility of very complex designs and the high temperature resistance of the core material, on which the top layers can be compression moulded. The main focus of the investigation, reported in this paper, is the characterisation of the bonding properties of sandwiches made of aluminium foam and top layers consisting of glass fibre reinforced polyamide via tensile tests perpendicular to the faces.