FEM modeling of compressive deformation behaviour of aluminum cenosphere syntactic foam (ACSF) under constrained condition

Abstract

The deformation behavior of aluminum cenosphere syntactic foam (ACSF) as a function of porosity, shell thickness, shell volume fraction and cenosphere volume fraction has been studied using finite element modelingof a representative unit cell of the respective material under both constrained and unconstrained conditions.The volume fraction of cenosphere and its shell thickness varies from 5% to 65% and 1 µm to 4 µm, respectively. It has been noted that as cenosphere volume fraction decreases, the plateau stress and Young’s modulus of these materials increases. While these values increase with increase in the shell thickness, i.e., shell volume fraction. The modulus and plateau stress increase considerably under constrained condition especially at low cenosphere volume fraction. The FEM predicted values are validated with experimental results and it is noted that the FEM predicted values are within the 12% variation of the experimental values. The proposed study thus shows that unit representative shell techniques are reasonably ideal and rapid method for predicting compressive deformation behavior of ACSF.