Comparative analysis of characteristics of stainless steel cellular material prepared through powder metallurgy using accicular and crushed urea as spaceholder

Abstract

Stainless steel has an excellent mechanical property as well as high corrosion resistance. Stainless steel foams, therefore, seemed like an attractive material for impact energy absorption applications where damping capability is required such as in vehicles and buildings. Also when stainless steel foam is produced as stainless steel foam, the material density will be reduced thus the resulting foam will be a combination of light weight and high strength that can also be used in high strength applications. In our analysis, we tried to produce stainless steel foam through powder metallurgy in order to control mechanical properties in a better manner compared to the casting method. Also, we try to compare the pore morphology in foams on changing the space holder from accicular urea to crushed urea using FE-SEM. The properties of stainless steel foam, to a large extent, are found to depend on the arrangement of the pores which is decided by the space holder utilized during its synthesis using powder metallurgy route. The stainless steel obtained using acicular carbamide as space holder is found to possess acicular or irregular pores whereas those produced with crushed urea as space holder possesses nearly circular holes. Also, the previous foams are found to have better mechanical properties contributing towards more useful metallic foam.