Application of Image Processing to Predict Compressive Behavior of Aluminum Foam

Abstract

An image processing technique was used to model the internal structure of aluminum foam in finite element analysis in order to predict the compressive behavior of the material. Finite element analysis and experimental tests were performed on aluminum foam with densities of 0.2, 0.25, and 0.3 g/cm3. It was found that although the compressive strength predicted from the finite element analysis was higher than that determined experimentally, the predicted compressive stress-strain curves exhibited a tendency similar to those determined from experiments for both densities. However, the behavior of the predicted compressive stress-strain curves was different from the experimental one as the applied strain increased. The difference between predicted and experimental stress-strain curves in a high strain range was due to contact between broken aluminum foam walls by the large deformation.

Keywords

• Aluminum foam
• Compute tomography (CT) image
• Finite element method (FEM)