Investigation of deformation behaviour of aluminium foam under high-strain rate loading and comparison with conventional energy absorbing material

The aim of this study is proper description of stress-strain behaviour of the metal foam structure Alporas under high-strain rate loading. Stress-strain response of Alporas specimens is measured during an impact test using a drop tower experiment. Strain of the specimens is evaluated by two independent approaches: i) double numerical integration of acceleration data and ii) digital image correlation technique. Thus, experimental setup is equipped with triaxial accelerometer and high speed camera. Resulting stress-strain curves are compared with behaviour of polystyrene material samples (polystyrene material is commonly used as a shock absorber) obtained from the same testing procedure and with stress-strain function determined from Alporas quasi-static compression testing