Applications of metal foams in shipbuilding and mining

Lightweight construction is a time-honored research field where metal foams are used to create lighter parts with a high degree of stiffness. However, with today´s steel designs, it is also possible to engineer lightweight parts for ships or in the mining industry. The crucial benefit of metal foams produced as a steel-aluminium foam sandwich is its excellent bending stiffness as sandwich construction an its dynamic behavior. This article will focus on ist potential applications in ship building an mining. One example will be a ship rudder which has a dimension of 3m high. The topic in this project was to reduce the mass of the rudder and to get a much more easier manufactoring route. To reach this target wa use SAS - steel aluminiumfoam sandwich, a light weight compound developed by the Fraunhofer IWU. The second part was the designing of a base of the main machine of a ship. The requirements are light weight design and reduction of vibrations. The vibrations from the machine come over the base into the ship body and you can hear it in the whole ship as noise. Especially for passenger ships is it not acceptable. The metal foam has a very good mechanical damping, with that we want to reduce the vibrations. Futhermore we show the design of a ship side wall what we can reduce by ist mass up to 27 percent. This means lower fuel consumption or a higher load capacity for each ship. The last example comes from the mining industry. There we developed a cross beam to bring out the coal over the conveyer belt. The target is to reduce the mass by 30%. This means an enormous reduction of energy consumption of the main drive.