Aluminium foams as a filler for leading edges: Improvements in the mechanical behaviour under bird strike impact tests

The use of aluminium foams as filler materials in aeronautical leading edges is investigated. Particularly, the improvement of the mechanical behaviour of the filled structure respect to the hollow one is analysed by means of standard bird strike impact tests. For this purpose, a collection of AlSi10 foams were fabricated using the powder metallurgical route (PM), and introduced into leading edges profiles, maintaining or reducing the total weight of the composite structure (leading edge + aluminium foam) in comparison with the original one (hollow structure). Bird strike impact tests were carried out in both types of structures, comparing the global deformation and total load transferred in the tests. The results showed that the composite structure, a 13% lighter than the original one, showed four times better behaviour in terms of global deformation and an improvement of two times in the transmitted load.