ABSTRACT
Ceramic foams constitute a specific class of materials containing a high level of porosity which are characterized by the presence of a recognizable "cell," that is an enclosed empty space possessing faces and solid edges. This chapter describes the main manufacturing strategies, namely replication, sacrificial template, and direct foaming processes. The replication of polymer foams was one of the first fabricating techniques developed for producing ceramic foams with controlled macroporosity and the method was patented by Schwartzwalder and Somers. The sacrificial template method consists of coating a spherical polymer particle by slurry or a gel solution of ceramic material. The direct foaming method alloys the manufacturing of ceramic foams possessing dense struts. In 1665, Robert Hooke examining a section of cork in his microscope used the term "cell" to describe its structure. Modeling of mechanical properties of bulk foams is usually made using Gibson-Ashbyand Zhang approaches derived using a cubic unit cell and a Kelvin cell, respectively.
