Special review: Mechanical investigation on failure modes of reticular porous metal foams under different loadings in engineering applications

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a summarization and review of the present author's main investigations on failure modes of reticular metal foams under different loadings in engineering applications. Design/methodology/approach With the octahedral structure model proposed by the present authors themselves, the fundamentally mechanical relations have been systematically studied for reticular metal foams with open cells in their previous works. On this basis, such model theory is continually used to investigate the failure mode of this kind of porous materials under compression, bending, torsion and shearing, which are common loading forms in engineering applications. Findings The pore-strut of metal foams under different compressive loadings will fail in the tensile breaking mode when it is brittle. While it is ductile, it will tend to the shearing failure mode when the shearing strength is half or nearly half of the tensile strength for the corresponding dense material and to the tensile breaking mode when the shearing strength is higher than half of the tensile strength to a certain value. The failure modes of such porous materials under bending, torsional and shearing loads are also similarly related to their material species. Originality/value This paper presents a distinctive method to conveniently analyze and estimate the failure mode of metal foams under different loadings in engineering applications.