Forming Analysis of Metal-Polymer-Metal Sandwich Sheets

The sheet metals are exclusively used with the single materials in the industry, which is expensive and more weight. This can be overcome by introducing the new sheet metal concepts as Metal-Polymer-Metal (MPM) sandwich sheet composite. This MPM sandwich sheets are less weight and cost-effective. Many researches already attempted on various Al alloys and Steel alloys along with polymer for their formability studies. For any MPM sandwich sheets after the fabrication, tensile behavior has to be studied by which the formability of MPM sandwich sheets can be predicted using finite element software. This study focuses on investigating the forming behavior of sandwich sheets made of AA5052-PVC-AA5052 (Al-PVC-Al) through numerical simulations conducted using the PAMSTAMP 2G software. The objective is to predict the forming behavior of both the Al-PVC-Al sandwich material and the base material, AA5052 alloy, using computer-based simulations. The mechanical properties of Al-PVC-Al were evaluated through uniaxial tensile testing and obtained the properties such as yield strength (YS), ultimate tensile strength (UTS), strain hardening exponent (n), material strength coefficient (K) and Plastic strain ratio (R). These mechanical properties were used for numerical simulations by modeling the limit dome height tests in the PAMSTMAP finite element software. From the simulation results, it was observed that Al-P-Al sheets having the better formability than base metal.