Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials IFAMThe reduction of material consumption in vehicles, machines and devices is a constant demand from industry in order to achieve a conservation of resources as well as savings in energy and costs. With this focus, novel lightweight materials have been developed in recent years, which partly are already being tested in industrial applications. A promising class of materials are cellular metallic materials. The required saving of weight is achieved by the defined integration of pores.
Besides drastic savings in weight and, thus, material, additional application-specific properties, which are defined especially by the material and the cell structure, can be realised through cellular metallic materials; e.g. sound absorption, heat insulation, energy absorption, mechanical damping, material and energy transport or catalytic effects.