Email this article and Applied Mechanics
56, 4, pp. 939-949, Warsaw 2018
DOI: 10.15632/jtam-pl.56.4.939
Low-velocity impact behaviour of open-cell foams
in other natural or human-made materials. While the impact characteristics of closed-cell
foams under static and impact loadings appear to be well-studied in the literature, the impact
behaviour of open-cell foams is not yet well-understood. In this study, open-cell foams with
two different densities are impacted by drop weights with different kinetic energies. The
effects of foam density, impactor initial height, and impactor weight on the recorded stresstime,
stress-strain, and energy-strain curves are investigated. While the stress-strain curve
of closed-cell foams under impact loading usually consists of a single bell, the results of
the current study showed that both the stress-time and stress-strain curves of most the
samples consist of two consecutive bells. By increasing weight of the impacting weight,
the number of bells increases which helps in increasing the impact period and keeping the
maximum generated stress low. Compared to closed-cell foams, the open-cell foams can
therefore better absorb the energy, as long as the impact energy is relatively small. The
relatively low stiffness as well as the presence of large hollow space inside the open-cell
foams also makes them favorable for being used as biomedical scaffolds.
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