The Effect of Transient Liquid Phase on the Joining Process of Aluminum Foam Core Sandwiches

Despite recent developments in sandwich panels production technology, there are some difficulties in joining core sandwiches. Liquid Phase Sintering is a conventional method to increase the density of powder metallurgy parts. In this paper, we applied LPS as a joining process between Al-foam and Al-metal by using Al-mixture powders with different compositions as the interlayer. At first stage, Al-Zn powder mixture was used and the possibility of this process was investigated. At later stages, we tried to increase the joint bonding strength with different Al-mixture powder compositions. 3-point bending test was applied and by using mathematical relations, bonding strengths were calculated. The highest bonding strength was obtained, about 9 kPa, when Al-Zn-Mg was used as the interlayer. Also energy dispersive spectrometry (EDS) was used to investigate the diffusion of additive elemental powders to Al-mixture powders.