Effect of influencing parameters on developing aluminium metal foam by using powder metallurgy technique with a foaming agent as a wax powder

Abstract

Aluminum metal foam has become an advanced popular material because it has excellent mechanical and electrical properties and is lightweight. The present work developed the Aluminium metal foam specimen using wax powder as a blowing agent through the powder metallurgy method. The effect of process parameters such as powder size, stirring speed, sintering temperature, and foaming agent content on the mechanical behavior of the developed specimens has been studied experimentally. In the design of experiments, the Taguchi orthogonal L9 array has been implemented. The percentage of porosity was estimated using the Archimedes principle, and mechanical behaviors such as flexural, tensile, and compressive strength were determined. The ANOVA analysis of variance it’s been carried out to check the significant parameters affecting the mechanical behavior of developed specimens. It was observed that the powder size is the highly significant parameter, followed by stirring speed, the content of the foaming agent, and sintering temperature. The Maximum Porosity is 71.30%, Compression strength 12.01 MPa, Tensile strength is 6.16 MPa, and Flexural strength is 5.18 MPa. The microstructure study reveals that there is no adequate composition in the specimen. The novelty in this research work is using a novel foaming agent as a Wax powder to develop aluminium metal foam and attain good properties.