ABSTRACT
Metallic foams are cellular materials with a stochastic distribution of voids that can be regular and closed (foam) or complex and interconnected (sponge) (Wad01).
Many structural applications get benefit from the adoption of closed cell foams due to excellent stiffness to weight ratio and good shear and fracture strength (e.g. lightweight structures and sandwich cores). They have exceptional ability to absorb energy at almost uniform load allowing to design compact and light energy absorbers. Moreover they have an improved damping capacity that is larger than that of solidmetals by up to a factor of 10 and by high flexural vibration frequencies. This makes them suitable for mechanical dumping and vibration control, in particular in the field of industrial tools. Open cell structures, thanks to high surface/volume ratio and to the possibility of controlling the pore size (Ash00), have potential interesting applications as support for catalytic converters for diesel engines, parts of heat exchangers, flowthrough devices and electrodes for NiMH and NiCd batteries.
