Experimental response of full‐scale steel‐aluminium foam‐steel sandwich panels in bending

The introduction of metal foams into the building market represents a significant opportunity to increase the use of metal in construction. Developing new structural products made of metal foams and steel could improve conventional buildings' performances in terms of stiffness and resistance. Steel or aluminium foams are characterised by mechanical properties similar to glulam timber, combined with a high energy dissipation capacity. These peculiarities allow conceiving new composites with features typical of the bio‐mimetic materials: lightness, compactness, dissipation, resistance and stiffness. The first structural applications of these materials have already shown the potentialities of composites made of foam and steel, verifying the possibility to realise mono‐dimensional and bi‐dimensional elements with exceptionally high resistance‐weight ratios. Reducing the structural weight can represent a significant advantage in many cases, such as for buildings in the seismic zone or for infrastructures. Within this framework, this preliminary work paper aims to analyse the response of full‐scale metallurgically bonded sandwich panels made of steel and aluminium foam with three‐point bending tests. From the testing, it was confirmed that the metallurgically bonded sandwich panels reach the full‐plastic strength that is computed from the rigid‐plastic material assumption. Moreover, the sandwich panel's bending stiffness can be easily calculated according to the Navier hypotheses. The ultimate limit state of the sandwich panel was determined by the plastic hinge formation of the panel section; fracture between the aluminium foam and the steel sheet was not observed (except the layer where the it was initially detached). The potential performance of the metallurgically bonded sandwich panel that can be used for the civil engineering application was verified from this testing.