Fabrication and characterization of porous metal body by PU dipping process

The metal porous body has interesting structural characteristics such as high specific strength and lightness and high antivibration, damping and sound absorption properties and also has excellent functional characteristics such as unique thermal insulation and catalytic carrier absorption and so on. With these advantages, recently, it has been using a high performance lubricant bearing, filters for filtration, absorbing materials, and heat exchanger and fuel cell components materials etc. Therefore, it has been actively researched to produce the metal porous body having the good properties. There are some several methods to make the porous metal body. Among them, the PU dipping process is excellent, simple and economical effective method. In this study, the porous Fe foam by the PU dipping process was prepared and characterized. Fe slurry was prepared by dispersing Fe powders in the distilled water (DIW), in where the dispersing agent hydroxyalkyl methyl cellulose (Hecellose) was used. After then the porous polyurethane template was dipped in the Fe slurry followed with drying in the air for 1 day under room temperature. The porous metal body was obtained after burning out the porous polyurethane at 600°C in the argon atmosphere for 1 hour followed with sintering at 1200°C in the argon atmosphere for 1 hour. In the first step of sintering process, pyrolyzing and debinding was happened to remove out the polyurethane. The prepared porous metal's appearance was observed through visual identification method. Microstructure of Fe foam was observed by optical microscopy, pore size and shape were observed by FE-SEM, and so on.