• Journal of Korea Foundry Society
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.267-271
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• 2006

Metal foam is a class of attractive materials, which exhibits unique combinations of physical, mechanical, thermal, electrical and acoustic properties. In particular, it is light and good at absorbing energy, which makes it attractive in automotive and aerospace applications weight is critical. In this paper, the Mg alloy foam was prepared by melt foaming method by addition of calcium as thickening agent, and $TiH_2$ or $CaCO_3$ powder as blowing agent. The macrostructural observation of foamed Mg showed that the pore structures of Mg alloy foam made by $CaCO_3$ as blowing agent were much better than that of foams made by $TiH_2$ as blowing agent. In addition, this paper showed the possible reason of fabrication magnesium alloy foam in proportion to blowing agent and the porosity range was about 40 to 76% as results value.

• Korean Journal of Materials Research
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.309-315
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• 2012

Metal foam has many excellent properties, such as light weight, incombustibility, good thermal insulation, sound absorption, energy absorption, and environmental friendliness. It has two types of macrostructure, a closed-cell foam with sealed pores and an open-cell foam with open pores. The open-cell foam has a complex macrostructure consisting of an interconnected network. It can be exploited as a degradable biomaterial and a heat exchanger material. In this paper, open cell Mg alloy foams have been produced by infiltrating molten Mg alloy into porous pre-forms, where granules facilitate porous material. The granules have suitable strength and excellent thermal stability. They are also inexpensive and easily move out from open-cell foamed Mg-Al alloy materials. When the melt casting process used an inert gas, the molten magnesium igniting is resolved easily. The effects of the preheating temperature of the filler particle mould, negative pressure, and granule size on the fluidity of the open cell Mg alloy foam were investigated. With the increased infiltration pressure, preheat temperature and granule sizes during casting process, the molten AZ31 alloy was high fluidity. The optimum casting temperature, preheating temperature of the filler particle mould, and negative pressure were $750^{\circ}C$, $400-500^{\circ}C$, and 5000-6000 Pa, respectively, At these conditions the AZ31 alloy had good fluidity and castability with the longest infiltration length, fewer defects, and a uniform pore structure.

• Journal of Korea Foundry Society
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.272-276
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• 2006

For the first time AZ91 (MgAl9Zn1) and AM60 (MgAl6) Mg alloy foams with homogeneous pore structures were prepared successfully via melting foaming method by using $CaCO_3$ powder as blowing agent. The possible foaming mechanisms and pore structures of these Mg alloy foams were discussed and investigated. The results show that Mg alloy melt can affect $CaCO_3$ decomposition behavior and AZ91 Mg alloy is relative easy to be foamed into metal foam with high porosity and big pore size.

• Journal of Korea Foundry Society
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.217-223
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• 2010

Foamed metal has become an attractive material, which has unique physical, thermal, acoustic, damping and mechanical properties, because large amount of pores are distributed in the metal matrix. Therefore, metal foam can be used for the light weight application in automotive, locomotive, aerospace fields. Aluminum foams have been developed successfully and will be employed in the next generation of energy absorption boxes. Magnesium alloys are most eligible candidate to substitute aluminum alloy, especially for lower density and higher damping properties in wide industrial fields. Magnesium alloy foams are expected to be particularly advantageous due to two thirds the density of aluminum. However, foaming magnesium have been weakness of high activity, difficult processing and very dangerous. In order to upgrade this problem, AM50 magnesium alloy which has better characteristic is safe to use through foaming time and alloying element in this study.

• Transactions of Materials Processing
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.588-596
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• 2003

The relationships between evolution of microstructure and mechanical properties of porous Al-3Si-2Mg-2Cu alloy after the foaming and various heat treating were investigated. The foamed alloy having various densities were manufactured by powder compact foaming and heat treated. Then compression test was performed with deformation rate of 0.5/s. The ultimate compression strength was not changed after solution heat treatment but the flow curve after ultimate strength showed very smooth and uniform plateau region. This change of flow curve means that the deformation mechanism is altered from brittle fracture to ductile deformation and the energy absorption property of Al foam is dramatically improved. The improvement of energy absorption without any detriment of mechanical properties is due to that the very brittle precipitation like Al-Cu and Al-Mg was uniformly dissolved in Al matrix after solution heat treatment. And various mechanical properties of Al alloy porous material were improved by 40% with aging of $200^{\circ}C$ and 50min. These improvements are ascribe to the various fine precipitates like $\Omega$ and $\theta$'.