Fabrication of a Porous Metal via Selective Phase Dissolution in Al-Cu Alloys

Through free corrosion, a new low cost porous material was successfully fabricated by removing a single phase of a binary aluminum-copper alloy. This selective phase dissolution was carried out an Al-Al2Cu eutectic alloy of the Al-Cu binary system and additionally for two hypereutectic compositions....

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Bibliographic Details
Published inMetals (Basel ) Vol. 8; no. 6; p. 378
Main Authors Vargas-Martínez, Juan, Estela-García, John, Suárez, Oscar, Vega, Carmen
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published MDPI AG 24.05.2018
Subjects
Al-Cu alloys
free corrosion
NaOH
porous metal
selective dissolution
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Summary:Through free corrosion, a new low cost porous material was successfully fabricated by removing a single phase of a binary aluminum-copper alloy. This selective phase dissolution was carried out an Al-Al2Cu eutectic alloy of the Al-Cu binary system and additionally for two hypereutectic compositions. The porosity of the material depends on the microstructure formed upon solidification. For this reason, several solidification methods were studied to define the most convenient in terms of uniformity and refinement of the average pore and ligament sizes. The samples were corroded in a 10% v/v NaOH aqueous solution, which demonstrated to be the most convenient in terms of time involved and resulting porosity conditions after the corrosion process. The porosity was measured through analysis of secondary electron images. The effectiveness of the process was verified using X-ray diffraction, which showed that, under the proposed methodology, there was complete removal of one of the phases, namely the aluminum one.
ISSN:2075-4701
2075-4701
DOI:10.3390/met8060378