Analysis Of steel foam for better energy absorption

Steel foam has been made by various companies over a long period of time. But the process of manufacturing has been very expensive, so large scale use was never thought of. Now with the use of latest technology like 3-D printing and chemical admixtures, we can produce steel foam at industrial level. Our project is based on determining how useful it could be. As of present it has been used by military for ballistic application of minimizing the damage by any explosives. We carried out compression tests on the various types of the steel foam (varied by material and pore sizes) and then compared the data with actual (i.e solid) data of the same material. We also used a software called SBEDS this software is only for the use of US Military but after special permission and verification we were given excess to this software. It is very useful in stimulating the data for material used. We are also tried make this stimulating software for the steel foam. This will be very useful in in earthquake retaining structure. We have observed from the data that the area under the stress stain curve has increased which implies that the energy absorption is higher with respect to the solid. It also could be used in the automobile industry for making the bumpers which will absorb more energy incase of a collision which will reduce the damage done to the driver and passenger