Bi-continuous alumina/aluminium composites were made by infiltrating an alumina preform which had the structure of a reticulated ceramic foam. The low density preforms were prepared from a polyurethane suspension of alumina powder which was pyrolysed and sintered after foaming. Higher density preforms consisted of ceramic foams with open cells. All these preforms were infiltrated with 6061 alum...

Foam injection is becoming a standard conditioning agent when tunnelling with an earth-pressure balanced shield, resulting in an increasing interest in this technique. The technique is mostly based on empirical rules and experience. To be able to determine what foam and how may foam has to be injected for different soils, it is necessary to know the mechanical parameters of the foam-water-soil ...

A novel numerical formulation of the two-phase macroscopic balance equations governing the flow field in incompressible porous media is presented. The numerical model makes use of the Weighted Average Flux (WAF) method and Total Variation Diminishing (TVD) flux limiting techniques, and results in a second-order accurate scheme. A shock tube study was carried out to examine the interaction of a ...

Focusing on radiative properties (absorption and scattering coefficient, scattering phase-function) of silicon carbide foams, several predictive models are compared to spectral transmittance and reflectance measurements (bi-directional and directionalhemispherical) in the aim of determining new correlations based on ceramic foam characteristics (struts/pores size and porosity). A mono-dimension...

One way of generating light weight composites is to insert porous ceramic grains into the melt of the matrix. The foam like inner structure of the grains causes a considerable weight reduction. On the other hand, it is desired that the mechanical properties of the matrix carry over to the composite. The properties of the composite depend both on the structure of grains as well as on their distr...

While titanium has been clinically successful as an orthopedic or dental implant material, performance problems still persist related to implant-bone interfacial strength and mechanical modulus mismatch between titanium and tissue. We describe here the preparation of a titanium foam as a better mechanical match to tissue with surfaces attractive to bone cells through deposition of an organicall...

Beyond the state of the art, EVOLVE aims at the development of a new cell architecture for SOFC, combining benefits of existing Anode Supported (high power density, lifetime) and Metal Supported cell (redox stability) architectures, while limiting the issue of sulphur poisoning by using enhanced perovskite anode materials. The core component is based on a composite anode substrate made of porou...

This paper presents the software iMorph developed in our laboratoryin order to perform geometrical measurements on porous media from 3D images (!CT, MRI...). The different morphological and segmentation methods originally developed for metallic foam [1] have been extended to cellular materials. We present here a study performed on a large panel of different cellular materials such as ceramic sp...