Fabrication of nickel honeycombs

This paper reports a novel technique to fabricate hexagonal honeycomb structures. Here, a low-melting coating on stacked circular tubes is used to form liquid bridges at the tube junctions upon heating. The surface tension in these bridges then pulls the curved tube elements continuously to create planar walls, thereby replacing the circular core structures with ones of hexagonal geometry. An analysis of this process explains the rate of evolution of the tube radius based on the flow law of the tube material, the latter being influenced by the penetration of liquid phase along the boundaries of the nickel grains in the tubes.