Manufacturing, characterization and applications of lightweight metallic foams for structural applications: Review

Abstract Metallic foam becomes most promising class of material in industrial and scientific area due to advantages of unique combination of mechanical properties like lower weight, high energy absorbing capacity, high stiffness and high damping capacity. Metal foams are being used in many industrial applications such as light weight structural applications, bone implants, filters, electrodes, heat exchangers etc. The purpose of this study is to summarize the fabrication and characterization of metal foam for bone implant applications. Various biomaterials, fabrication methods of metal foam, aluminium and its alloy foam and characterization techniques are reviewed in present work.