EDITO

RIA

L

Editorial

ADVANCED ENGINEERING MATERIALS 2008, 10, No. 3 © 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim 147

Editorial

This Special Issue of Advanced Engineering Materials collects selected papers thatwere presented at Symposium B25 “Highly Porous Metals and Ceramics” (P. Colom-bo and C. Körner, organizers) in the framework of Euromat 2007, the European Con-gress and Exhibition on Advanced Materials and Processes. The congress, organizedby FEMS (The Federation of European Materials Societies), took place in Nürnberg,Germany, from September 10th to 13th, 2007, and was attended by numerous research-ers coming mostly from Europe, but also from countries such as China, Japan and theUSA.The symposium focused on metallic and ceramic materials specifically containinghigh volume fractions of porosity. Such solids commonly exhibit cellular architecturesand they include foams, honeycombs, fiber networks, connected rods, connected hol-low bodies, syntactic foams, bio-inspired structures etc. Relative density can rangefrom a few % up to well over 60 %, and the pores may be closed or open (inter-con-nected), regular or stochastic, equiaxed or elongated, randomly-oriented or aligned,uniform or graded etc., so that various pore architectures and associated characteris-tics can be created. Such porous materials therefore exhibit a wide range of functionaland mechanical properties, making them potentially attractive for various engineer-ing applications. These encompass the areas of thermal management, impact energyabsorption, filtration of fluids, catalyst support scaffolds, biomedical devices, cores ofstrong and stiff sandwich panels etc. Usage usually occurs in demanding physio-chemical environments, for which ceramic and metallic materials are most suited, butceramic/metallic hybrid porous structures and composite materials can also beutilized.The contributions dealt mainly with processing technology, architectural and micro-structural characterization, material properties, component design criteria and com-puter modeling of structure, properties and device performance. The papers herecollected reflect the existing widespread interest in metals and ceramics with highporosity, and provide an insight particularly into the directions in which newprocessing developments and special applications for these fascinating and usefulmaterials are currently headed.

Professor Paolo ColomboDepartment of Mechanical Engineering,University of Padova, Italy and Departmentof Materials Science and Engineering,The Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA