Failure Analysis of Aluminum – Ceramic Composites

The increasingly widespread use of syntactic metal foams is due to their excellent energy absorbing characteristics. Several research groups deal with developing methods that can further improve this characteristic. Several literature analyses have been devoted to the effects of materials selection, cell size and wall thickness of the reinforcing element on the compression strength. In this work an in situ test necessary for the modeling of the failure process introduced. The aluminum-ceramic composite foams were cyclically upset. The geometry of the test specimen was reconstructed at a certain point of the compression test by μCT technology and digital image analysis. The failure process was characterized by volume change, by the number of broken shells and by the formation of shear plane as a function of the deformation.