Highly Porous Metals and Ceramics

Highly Porous Metals and Ceramics is the name of a symposium which run in the framework of EUROMAT 2011, held in Montpellier, France, from the 12th to the 15th of September 2011. The symposium focused on porous structures possessing a volume fraction of porosity approximately >50 vol% as well as on cellular materials, which typically possess a void fraction >70 vol% and a specific architecture. Some presentations, selected from 20 lectures given and 23 posters displayed at the conference, were invited for publication in this AEM volume. Advances in the field of processing highly porous materials are here published, as well as some applications demonstrating the wide range of functional and mechanical properties achievable for these components, based on their specific morphology and microstructure, which span different size scales. These contributions together with further publications in other journals indicate the existing great interest in highly porous materials and offer a snapshot of the current state of the art, highlighting the ongoing research in this exciting field of heterogeneous materials. It is our hope that this special issue of AEM will provide beneficial information to researchers already working in this field and will stimulate the curiosity and interest of those who have not yet entered it. We are grateful to the authors as well as to AEM for enabling the publication of this special issue.