Future of Metal Foam Materials in Automotive Industry

Abstract

With the growing industrial development and reliance on fossil fuels, green house gas emission has become a major problem. Transportation plays a massive role in producing CO2 gas emission with personal vehicles producing the largest share. Light weighting is a possible solution of reducing the CO2 gas emissions. On an average, 100 kg of mass reduction achieved on a passenger car saves about 9 g of CO2 per km at the car exhaust. Some lightweight materials are already being used in automobile sector such as aluminum, magnesium, their alloys, composite materials, etc. A novel category is metal foams, which are one of the metal matrix composites, having uniformly distributed gaseous pores as reinforcement embedded in the metal matrix. A high porosity in metal foams makes them potential candidates to absorb the large amount of mechanical energy, damping vibrations and ability of sound absorption which can be well exploited in automotive industry. As per requirement in different sectors, metal foam of different metals has been developed like Al, Mg, Fe, etc. Based on the porosity of metal foams, they have found their applications in the functional and structural field. This book chapter emphasizes on the recent development in the field of metal foams, mechanical properties, which can be exploited in the automotive industry, processing method and also gives the overview of existing and as well as the potential field where these novel material can be utilized.