Study of internal porous structure formation of the powder metallurgically prepared aluminium foam

Abstract

The internal pore wall structure formation and density play an important role in improving the mechanical and thermal properties of the closed-cell aluminium foams. The present research work aims to investigate the internal structure formation of the aluminium foam prepared by powder metallurgy and the uniformity of the distribution of the pores when the minimum amount of TiH2 is added. The foamable precursor of two different aluminium alloys (Al-1050 and A5083) is produced with a TiH2 gaseous agent of 0.05 wt.%. The parameters analysed include the density, pore wall formations, pore, and metal density distribution inside the structure with the help of X-ray tomography. Furthermore, the image-processing technique has been adopted to produce the 3D surrogate model of the foam for visual inspection and analysis. The obtained results show the importance of the amount of TiH2 addition and of the foaming furnace temperature in deciding the internal porous structure formation. Further, the pore morphology of lower porosity foams (in the range of 30-40 % porosity) of the two alloys produced at 690 °C furnace temperature is investigated with the help of developed surrogate models. The presence of micropores and uniformity of the distribution of pores found brings the idea of choosing the optimized structure of foam for thermal energy storage systems associated with PCM.