Preface: syntactic and composite foams special section

Abstract

A conference titled ‘‘Syntactic and Composite Foams III’’ (SCF III), under the auspices of Engineering Conferences International (ECI), was held in May/June 2011 in Cetraro (Calabria), Italy. This conference was the third in the series. The conference was chaired by Dr. G. M. Gladysz (Trelleborg Offshore US), Professor K. K. Chawla (University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA), and Professor A. R. Boccaccini (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg). An international organizing committee with representatives from universities, industries, and government laboratories was involved in reviewing the papers for publication in this special section of Journal of Materials Science. The first, SCF I, was held in Banff, Canada, in 2004. Papers from that conference were published in a Special Issue on Syntactic and Composite Foams in the Journal of Materials Science (Volume 41, Number 13). The second, SCF II, was held in Davos, Switzerland, in 2007 and the papers were again published in a special issue of the Journal of Materials Science (Volume 44, Number 6). These first two conferences, also held under the auspices of ECI, provided an excellent forum for discourse among scientists and engineers from the academia, industry, and research laboratories on the subject of syntactic and composite foams. Composite foams are cellular materials consisting of a binder phase, reinforcing/functional phase(s), and voids distributed throughout. The reinforcing phase can be solid or hollow. Syntactic foams are a particular type of composite foam. In this case the reinforcing particles are hollow microspheres also called microballoons with a polymer, metal, or ceramic binder material. Analogous to the fibrous composites in many ways, composite foams are multifunctional materials which offer many ways to tailor a wide range of physical and mechanical properties and functionalities. The fact that they are foams, i.e., exhibiting a designed void structure, suggests that they are suited for specific applications such as those requiring low density, high permeability and/or bio-scaffolding. The incorporation of functional phases (fibers or particles) or microballoon shell material can allow one to tailor the structure to property: mechanical, thermal, electrical etc. In syntactic foams, the presence of hollow microspheres results in a foam of low density, high compressive strength, and generally a low thermal expansion coefficient. These foams are typically used in applications that take advantage of their very high specific properties, pore structure, and energy absorbing characteristics. If a reinforcing and/or functional phase is added to a foam, we get a composite foam with additional desirable characteristics. These additions expand the potential applications beyond those of the traditional deep sea buoyancy into more complex structures for use in aerospace, automotive, communications, biomedical, electronics, sporting, and transportation industries. We now have held the third in the series, SCF III and are publishing the third JMS Special issue containing peerreviewed papers based on research presented at the conference. We started planning of SCF I in 2002 while this batch has a target publication date of 2012, which allows us to take a look back over the last decade and also project G. M. Gladysz (&) Trelleborg Offshore, Mansfield, MA, USA e-mail: gary.gladysz@trelleborg.com