On the Way to Real Applications: Aluminum Matrix Syntactic Foams

Abstract

In recent times, aluminum matrix syntactic foams (AMSFs) have become considerably attractive for many industries such as automotive, aviation, aerospace and composite sector due to their features of low density, good compression strength, perfect energy absorption capacity and good ductility. Since the AMSF includes filler materials providing high porosity, it can be also named as composite foam and can be placed between traditional metal foams and particle reinforced composites. Glass and ceramic hollow spheres, fly ash cenospheres and ceramic porous materials are usually used in the AMSFs, but, lately, different types of fillers being cheaper and stronger have also being investigated. Although many scientific efforts have been made for the last decade to understand mechanical and physical properties of these advanced materials, studies have mainly been performed on relatively small size samples and remained in laboratory. Therefore, there is still room for improvement in terms of fabrication techniques. In this paper, our aims are to scrutinize newest studies about ASMFs, to create new viewpoints and to introduce an alternative bright perspective for probable real applications.

Keywords

• aluminum alloys
• syntactic foam
• microstructure
• compression response
• fracture mechanism

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