Ultralight metal foams.
Ultralight (<10 mg/cm3) cellular materials are desirable for thermal insulation; battery electrodes; catalyst supports; and acoustic, vibration, or shock energy damping. However, most of these ultralight materials, especially ultralight metal foams, are fabricated using either expensive materials or complicated procedures, which greatly limit their large-scale production and practical applications. Here we report a simple and versatile method to obtain ultralight monolithic metal foams. These materials are fabricated with a low-cost polymeric template and the method is based on the traditional silver mirror reaction and electroless plating. We have produced ultralight monolithic metal foams, such as silver, nickel, cobalt, and copper via this method. The resultant ultralight monolithic metal foams have remarkably low densities down to 7.4 mg/cm3 or 99.9% porosity. The metal foams have a long flat stress-train curve in compression tests and the densification strain εD of the Ni/Ag foam with a porosity of 99.8% can reach 82%. The plateau stress σpl was measured and found to be in agreement with the value predicted by the cellular solids theory.
School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, P.R. China.|Tianjin Special Equipment Inspection Institute, Tianjin 300192, P.R. China.
Bin
B
Jiang
School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, P.R. China.
Chunnian
C
He
School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, P.R. China.
Naiqin
N
Zhao
Thermal Processing Technology Center, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616, USA.
Philip
P
Nash
School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, P.R. China.
Chunsheng
C
Shi
Tianjin Special Equipment Inspection Institute, Tianjin 300192, P.R. China.
Zejun
Z
Wang