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Advanced Research Developments and Commercialization of Light Weight Metallic Foams

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Handbook of Nanomaterials and Nanocomposites for Energy and Environmental Applications

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Abstract

Metallic foams (MFs) are a moderately new class of designing materials having a unique kind of properties including high strength-to-weight ratio and appealing energy absorption characteristics contrasted with their bulk counterparts. These striking properties of MFs make them reasonable for applications in wide areas, e.g., impact energy absorption, load-bearing sandwich cores for aerospace and ground transportation industries, in automobile components to reduce weight, as heat sinks for thermal management, fortifying building and transport structures against impacts or buckling, etc. The various manufacturing processes are grouped by the state of matter in which the metal is handled – solid, liquid, gaseous, or ionized. This chapter reports the most simple and versatile process called “replication process” which offers a versatile way to produce open-cell foams, also called metal sponges. The basis of this process was developed in the 1960s, which uses a leachable preform (NaCl particles work well for aluminum), into which a molten material is infiltrated under inert gas pressure and solidified, before leaching of the preform to leave an open-celled structure. Replication process can be implicated to manufacture pure aluminum and other alloy foams of various materials and sizes. Replication can be done by covering with metal vapor, electroplating, or investment casting. Different structures can be utilized as templates for making cell materials: free or sintered main part of inorganic or natural granular issue, hollow spheres, or even customary polymer structures which are changed over to a metallic structure in an assigned preparing step.

The present chapter also reports an investigation of metallic foams which has turned out to be appealing to analysts keen on both scientific and industrial applications. The ideology of research is focused on manufacturing process of lightweight metallic foam. This chapter is focused on making production more reliable and to improve the properties of foamed metals. A second important field is the investigation of structure-property relationships. Intuitively it seems obvious that uniform metal foam with smooth cell walls yields the best mechanical properties. Third, modeling of metal foam structures is important for being able to interpret the experimental data and to help design engineers to apply the material. Besides these areas there are other more technological fields of interest such as joining, cutting, or coating of metal foams.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

    Kumar Harshit

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, A.S.E.T., Amity University Uttar Pradesh, Noida, India

    Pallav Gupta

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  1. Kumar Harshit
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  2. Pallav Gupta
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Correspondence to Pallav Gupta .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry Science, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, San Nicolás de los Garza, Mexico

    Oxana Vasilievna Kharissova

  2. Instituto de Ingeniería Civil, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, San Nicolás de los Garza, Nuevo León, Mexico

    Leticia Myriam Torres-Martínez

  3. Facultad de Ciencias Químicas, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, San Nicolás de los Garza, Mexico

    Boris Ildusovich Kharisov

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Harshit, K., Gupta, P. (2021). Advanced Research Developments and Commercialization of Light Weight Metallic Foams. In: Kharissova, O.V., Torres-Martínez, L.M., Kharisov, B.I. (eds) Handbook of Nanomaterials and Nanocomposites for Energy and Environmental Applications. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36268-3_7

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