Togliatti State University, Togliatti, Russia:

A. I. Kovtunov, Professor, Doctor of Technical Sciences
Yu. Yu. Khokhlov, Head of Laboratory, e-mail: y.y.khokhlov@rambler.ru
S. V. Myamin, Category II Engineer, Professor, Doctor of Technical Sciences

Aluminum foam has been increasingly used in industry due to its low density, ability to absorb acoustic and electromagnetic oscillations, and deformability under constant load. The only constraint to the applicability of aluminum foam is due to its main drawback — i.e. low strength. Application of aluminum foam/titanium lamellar composite material instead of aluminum foam significantly improves the strength of the final products. An innovative technique for obtaining lamellar composite materials on the basis of aluminum foam /titanium involves penetration of aluminum melt in a mould with titanium plates that is filled with water-soluble granules. The granules create porosity. The titanium plates are pre-coated with aluminium and activated with the KF – AlF₃ flux of eutectic concentration to ensure adhesion between titanium and porous aluminium. The study showed that with the help of the proposed technology one can obtain lamellar composite materials with high adhesive bonding. The compression test conducted on samples of lamellar composite material with two 1 mm titanium plates showed that, depending on the thickness of the foam aluminum layer and the size of granules used to form it, the ultimate strength can increase by 2–2.5 times. As the study demonstrated, the use of lamellar composite material results in a higher density of the final products. A bigger size of the water-soluble granules and a thinner porous layer are associated with decreased porosity and, consequently, higher density of the material. The proposed technology provides minimum 15 MPa of adhesion strength between titanium and aluminium, as determined by adhesion test.
This research was funded by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation under the Governmental Assignement No. 11.6065.2017/8.9.

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