[Yiming New Material] How to unlock the aluminum alloy for automotive aluminum foam?

▲ What does this product have to do with bubbles and cars?

1. History of aluminum foam

Generally speaking, the requirements of older young women who want to find someone are not high. You don't need to meet 3 180s (don't ask what you mean, how does Che Jujun know that he is so pure), he just needs to be as sunny and handsome as Peng Yuyan, who can make up his sister, and he is as loyal and honest as Wang Baoqiang with a high income, that's it.

Well, quickly wake up from the entertainment industry.

In the automotive industry, there really is such a material. Like foam, it has large porosity, high specific surface area, strong damping and shock absorption; like metal, it has high specific strength, high specific rigidity, high temperature resistance, and light weight. It is simply the dream girl of carmakers.

But you are not dreaming. As early as the late 1940s, the United States took the lead in researching this material, and in 1951, scientist Elliot took the lead in successfully producing foamed aluminum.

However, this material is difficult to control the foaming process, the size and uniformity of the foam, and the production is very difficult. It was not used on a large scale at that time, and the manufacturing and application of foamed aluminum have been stagnant for more than 40 years. . Until the end of the 1980s, the Kyushu Institute of Industrial Technology in Japan improved the production technology of foamed aluminum, and the development of foamed aluminum materials rose again in the world.

The first World Foam Metals Conference held in Bremen, Germany in 1999 was a milestone in the take-off of aluminum foam. Since then, the aluminum foam has moved from behind the scenes to the front stage in a real sense, and the degree of industrialization is getting higher and higher, and it is no longer a scientific research material that nobody cares about in the laboratory.

2. Preparation method of foamed aluminum

There are more than 20 kinds of foam aluminum preparation processes, covering a wide range of fields, but for the automotive industry, foam aluminum is not cheap, the processing technology is also more complicated, and the stability and reproducibility of various preparation processes are not very high. The problem of uneven pore structure has not been completely resolved.

The preparation of foamed aluminum is mainly solidification, sintering, deposition, etc. The solution foaming method is relatively simple, the pores are controllable, and the cost is low. It is more suitable for large-scale production of large-scale foamed aluminum materials.

Third, the application of foamed aluminum in the automotive industry

Because foamed aluminum has the characteristics of light weight, high specific strength, high specific stiffness, damping and shock absorption, sound absorption and heat insulation, battery shielding, etc., it has been used in aerospace, high-speed chips, and building materials. In recent years, this material Gradually enter the automotive field.

One of the classic applications of foamed aluminum is the foamed aluminum sandwich structure. Due to the combination of the performance of foamed aluminum and metal plate parts, this structure has better strength, more than 2 times the rigidity, more than 3 times the damping and collision avoidance, and the same year-on-year quality. Greatly reduced.