Fabrication and tensile tests of aluminum foam sandwich with dense steel face sheets by friction stir processing route

An aluminum foam sandwich was fabricated by FSP route. In this process, both the fabrication of a foamable precursor and the metallurgical bonding between the precursor and a dense steel sheet can be simultaneously conducted. Although intermetallic compounds consisting of Fe ₂Al ₅ and FeAl ₃ were generated, tensile tests revealed that the bonding strength of the interface was relatively high compared with the tensile strength of the aluminum foam with a porosity of approximately 80%.