Abstract
Porous aluminum (Al) was fabricated by a tool-traversing friction powder sintering process. In this process, a mixture of Al powder and sodium chloride (NaCl) powder as spacer particles was used as a starting material. The powder mixture was placed in a mold, compaction and sintering of the mixture was conducted only by the traversing of a rotating tool as in friction stir welding. In this study, functionally graded porous aluminum was fabricated by a tool-traversing friction powder sintering process which had different range of porosity of 60%, 70% and 80%. By X-ray computing tomography observation, it was found that the fabricated functionally graded porous Al had uniform pore distribution in each porosity range. By compression tests, it was shown that the plateau stress was decreased with the increased in porosity. Consequently, it was shown that compression properties of functionally graded porous Al can be controlled by volume fraction of NaCl.
