Casting Protocols for the Production of Open Cell Aluminum Foams by the Replication Technique and the Effect on Porosity

Erardo M. Elizondo Luna; Farzad Barari; Robert Woolley; Russell Goodall

doi:10.3791/52268

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Method Article

Casting Protocols for the Production of Open Cell Aluminum Foams by the Replication Technique and the Effect on Porosity

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DOI:

10.3791/52268

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December 11th, 2014

Erardo M. Elizondo Luna¹ , Farzad Barari² , Robert Woolley² , Russell Goodall¹

¹Department of Materials Science and Engineering, The University of Sheffield, ²Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Sheffield

Erratum Notice

Important: There has been an erratum issued for this article. View Erratum Notice

Summary

Replication is one of the processing techniques used for the production of porous metal sponges. In this paper one implementation of the method for the production of open celled porous aluminum is shown in detail.

Abstract

Metal foams are interesting materials from both a fundamental understanding and practical applications point of view. Uses have been proposed, and in many cases validated experimentally, for light weight or impact energy absorbing structures, as high surface area heat exchangers or electrodes, as implants to the body, and many more. Although great progress has been made in understanding their structure-properties relationships, the large number of different processing techniques, each producing material with different characteristics and structure, means that understanding of the individual effects of all aspects of structure is not complete. The replication process, where molten metal is infiltrated between grains of a removable preform material, allows a markedly high degree of control and has been used to good effect to elucidate some of these relationships. Nevertheless, the process has many steps that are dependent on individual “know-how”, and this paper aims to provide a detailed description of all stages of one embodiment of this processing method, using materials and equipment that would be relatively easy to set up in a research environment. The goal of this protocol and its variants is to produce metal foams in an effective and simple way, giving the possibility to tailor the outcome of the samples by modifying certain steps within the process. By following this, open cell aluminum foams with pore sizes of 1–2.36 mm diameter and 61% to 77% porosity can be obtained.

Introduction

Metal foams have attracted a large amount of interest and research effort in recent years as shown by the large body of work cited in wide ranging review articles such as Banhart¹, Conde et al.² or more recently Goodall and Mortensen³. Among the methods used for production of the material, the replication process is distinguished by its experimental simplicity and the degree of control over the final foam structure that can be offered. It should be noted that although in the literature such materials are often described as foams (and are here) as they are not produced by bubbles of gas within a liquid they are more appropriate....