Impact Response of Sacrificial Cladding Structure with an Alporas Aluminum Foam Core Under Blast Loading
This paper presents numerical and analytical studies of the response of a sacrificial cladding structure with an Alporas aluminum foam core and a thick mild steel cover and rear plates under blast loading. A suitable numerical model in LS-DYNA based on the coupled Load Blast Enhanced/Multi-Material Arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (LBE/MM-ALE) methods is selected and validated using the experimental data available in the literature. The shock front propagation and micro-inertia effects are responsible for the strength enhancement predicted in the virtual blast test. Two models with different decaying blast loading functions are examined to study the fluid–structure interaction (FSI) effect. The simulation results show that the FSI effect is negligible if the foam core is strain-rate insensitive. Further investigations should be conducted with analytical models if the core material of the sacrificial cladding structures exhibits a strong strain-rate effect (for example, Alporas foam).