The 9th edition of the METFOAM Conference series took place in Barcelona, Spain between the 30th of August and 2nd of September. The conference had more than 200 delegates from Europe, America and Asia working in manufacturing, characterisation, modelling, analysis and applications of metal foams. This conference series had a impressive lineup of keynote and invited talks in all aspects of metal foams, balancing between open and closed cell metal foams, as well as material engineering and applications. Professor J. Banhart of Helmholtz Centre in Berlin opened the conference with a historical overview of metal foams. It seems that metal foams are not so "novel" after all, since their roots go back to 1925 when Alexander de Meller, the improbable father of metal foams, filed the first patent for their production. It is believed that the inspiration for porosity in metals was most likely inspired by natural materials which are porous or cellular. It is not clear whether de Meller was able to produce metal foams, but in the late 40s and 50s the first metal foams appear in the Bjorksten Lab in the USA from metal melts. The historical overview through the early developments to the latest in production and applications framed the state of the art in metal foams and the slow progress of potential applications. The trend according to Prof Banhart is to go into small or niche markets and produce specific components where the mechanical and functional properties make metal foams the ideal candidate. He also highlighted the challenges for metal foam industrial uptake which includes the absence of reliable mechanical testing data, something that places INSIST in a good position in partially filling this gap.
My attendance at METFOAM 2015, provided me with the opportunity to get a complete overview of the historical and current trends in the various aspects of metal foam production, including improvements in existing technologies or new techniques such as metallic scaffold structures by reduction of 3D printed oxide inks. More importantly and closer to the objectives of INSIST was the presentations of Dr Thomas Hipke from Fraunhofer IWU Chemnitz on the fabrication and processing of metal foam sandwich structures, Prof. Krupp from HS Osnabrueck on standardisation and experimental studies of metal foams and Dr Jehring of Fraunhofer IFAM Dresden on cellular structures such as metal hollow spheres and metal cellular polyhedrals.
My attendance at METFOAM 2015, provided me with the opportunity to get a complete overview of the historical and current trends in the various aspects of metal foam production, including improvements in existing technologies or new techniques such as metallic scaffold structures by reduction of 3D printed oxide inks. More importantly and closer to the objectives of INSIST was the presentations of Dr Thomas Hipke from Fraunhofer IWU Chemnitz on the fabrication and processing of metal foam sandwich structures, Prof. Krupp from HS Osnabrueck on standardisation and experimental studies of metal foams and Dr Jehring of Fraunhofer IFAM Dresden on cellular structures such as metal hollow spheres and metal cellular polyhedrals.
INSIST was presented in the form of a poster at the end of the first day and I had the opportunity to discuss the proposed experimental plan with different delegates from both academia and the industry. You can download the poster from the link below. The project comes at a time where there are notable developments in manufacturing of both SAS (Steel Aluminium foam Sandwich) and steel hollow spheres with Havel Metal Foam GmbH and Hollomet GmbH scaling up productions. Our team at Cranfield has forged a working relationship with both companies and will be testing their material, addressing some of the aforementioned gaps in mechanical properties data. The first material specimens will be delivered at Cranfield in early October and the testing programme will commence soon.
Poster-Cranfield_s_yiatros-a1.pdf |
In other news, my latest article was published in Composite Structures earlier in July and can be found here. In two weeks time I will be spending some time at Hollomet getting trained on preparing graded core density sandwich structures with hollow spheres and later will present at the 8th Annual Biomimicry Education Summit at the SXSW Eco in Austin TX. More information about both of these in my next posts!