Compression properties of cost-efficient porous expanded clay reinforced AA7075 syntactic foams fabricated by industrial-oriented die casting technology

In today’s manufacturing industries, hard competition between rival firms makes it compulsory for researchers to design lighter and cheaper machine components due to the megatrends of cost-effectiveness and anti-pollution. At this point, aluminum syntactic foams (ASFs) are new-generation engineering composites and come into the upfront as a problem-solver. Owing to their features like low density, sufficient elongation, and perfect energy absorption ability, these advanced foams have been considerably seductive for many industrial sectors nowadays. In this study, an industrial-oriented automatic die casting technology was used for the first time to manufacture the combination of AA7075/porous expanded clay (PEC). Micro evaluations (optical and FESEM) reveal that there is a homogenous particle distribution in the foam samples, and inspections are compatible with the other ASF studies. Additionally, T6 aging heat treatment was operated on one half of the produced foams to explore the probable impact of aging on the compressive responses. Attained results show that PEC particles can be an alternative to expensive hollow spheres used in the previous works. Besides, a favorable relationship is ascertained between the aging treatment and mechanical properties such as compression strength and plateau strength.