Novel Metallic Hollow Sphere Structures

Abstract

The obvious advantages of metallic hollow sphere materials have lead to several attempts to produce such structures. None of these approaches has gained practical significance owing to the very high cost of the methods. A new powder metallurgical process using styrofoam spheres allows for the production of hollow spheres from arbitrary metals and alloys. The IFAM Department of Powder Metallurgy and Composite Materials, Dresden, has developed this process and added a method that produces random hollow sphere structures (RHS) directly from the green spheres.