Remanent Magnetic Field Scanning of Coating-Graded Hybrid Foams

The manufacturing of hybrid materials such as nickel/polyurethane (Ni/PU) hybrid foams and 3D printed hybrid materials with the aid of electrochemical coating of lightweight structures leads to new materials, which can be used as crash absorbers, but also for lightweight design applications. Optimizing the coating quality of the developed hybrid materials necessitates a characterization on different scales regarding the coating thickness distribution. The ferromagnetic properties of the nickel coating enable a remanent magnetization of the produced hybrid foams and a subsequent measurement of resulting magnetic fields, so that the time-consumption of a coating distribution determination could be enormously reduced by automating the quantification method. Previous studies have shown, that the local strength of these fields correlates with the deposited mass thus the coating thickness. The here presented automated measurement gives useful information about the homogeneity and the local coating thickness distribution according to an appropriate calibration. In order to optimize the coating quality of the newly developed hybrid materials, improved deposition conditions, as well as semi-automated characterization methods, are studied to establish a large-scale industrial production and a higher applicability of hybrid materials in the near future. Hybrid metal foams are lightweight materials with great potential for various applications. This study introduces a new method for determining coating thickness semi-automatically, which is validated using conventional microscopy. Results of the magnetic field distribution are co-simulated to further support experimental data.image (c) 2024 WILEY-VCH GmbH