Cellular metals - applications in mining and railway industry

Different manufacturing methods of cellular metals will be presented and some of them will be amplified. Furthermore material properties and different applications will be illustrated. As a result of the properties metal foam is useful for the construction of front opening hoods of commuter trains and high speed trains. The results of a large research project with a real demonstrator will be shown. A 5m long front cab made from aluminium foam sandwiches will shown and the way to design and build this railway application Another field of application is the mining. In a research projects are developed Hybrid-towing arm from in conveyor technology for coil mining. The towing arm was 27% lighter than the original one. The largest problem was to test the towning arms under real conditions. The test was now done and is passed succesfull. It was shown that such aluminium foams, especially as a sandwich, fulfil all technical requests in many branches. It is also described how metal foams are being used in serial application in the mechanical engineering.