Strategies for shaping of different ceramic foams

Porous ceramics are nowadays recognized to have the potential to be used for a wide variety of industrial applications. These span from filtration in metals foundry and casting to absorption, catalysts and catalyst supports to lightweight structural components. Thus, considerable research efforts are focused on innovative processing technologies resulting in better control of their structures and improvement of their properties. Ceramic foams are within these materials of great interest, especially for their application as filters for aluminum alloys and other nonferrous materials in foundry, in particular because of their resistance to high temperatures. However, shaping such kind of ceramic foams can result difficult and costly. This paper presents an explorative experimental campaign on the workability and characterization of various ceramic foams for the previous mentioned industrial application. grinding and drilling strategies have been applied in order to verify the possibility to effectively process the materials under investigation.