9. Design

The appearance properties used for the design function depend closely on the structure of the metal foam.

In addition to the intrinsic aspects of foam described above, it is possible, through suitable machining, to obtain very different aspects depending on the cells discovered during machining. Cymat uses this property on its stochastic foams with its Alusion™ product.

On regular structures, with bi-material composites, different cutting planes can be used to create a wide variety of patterns from the same basic structure (figure 33 ).