Experimental studies on development of hollow glass microspheres reinforced magnesium syntactic foam using stir and vacuum die casting methods

Abstract

The research attention on metal foams has been increasing for the past several decades owing to its low density Metal foams the materials that display a distinctive combination of physical and mechanical properties due to their light weight high specific stiffness strength to weight ratio and energy absorbing capabilities The performance of existing foams has not been promising due to strong variation in the cell structure These defects must be eliminated to enhance the properties of the synthesis foams with desired amount of orientation and porosity size Despite of this enhancement one critical limitation of the foam is their low strength and modulus The presence of hollow particles instead of gas porosity can provide a closed cell structure to these foams called syntactic foams Since the syntactic foams have not been produced by conventional foaming operations the composition and densities of syntactic foams are predictable It has been reported that weight percentage of reinforcement has an indirect proportional nature to density of syntactic foams Magnesium is the lowest density of any structural material with high specific strength From the literature survey it has been observed that only very little attention has been given to studies on magnesium matrix syntactic foams in comparison with Aluminium matrix syntactic foams The major difficulty on synthesising magnesium matrix syntactic foams is high chemical reactive ability of magnesium It is also tedious to synthesise magnesium based syntactic foam owing to large difference in the density of matrix and reinforcement Hence an endeavour has been made to introduce new series of magnesium alloy based light weight syntactic foam reinforced with hollow glass microspheres HGM for enhancing the mechanical property in the present study. newline