Cenosphere filled aluminum syntactic foam made through stir-casting technique

Cenospheres in the range of 30–50 vol.% were used as space holders for making syntactic aluminum foam having density 1.5–1.9 gm/cc using stir-casting technique. The synthesized syntactic foam (SF) was characterized in terms of microstructures, hardness and compressive deformation behaviour. It was noted that the SF behaves like a high strength aluminium foam under compressive deformation exhibiting flat plateau region in the stress–strain curves. The plateau stress of SF decreases with cenosphere volume fraction vis-à-vis porosity following a power law relationship. But, the densification strain increases linearly with cenosphere volume fraction.