Reticulated foams have a continuous skeleton network consisting of aluminosilicates and are used for capturing gaseous cesium released from spent nuclear fuel at high temperature. It has high stability to high temperature and good capturing performance. Homogeneous cell distribution and modified surface structures are indispensable conditions for stable operation and handling. In particular, triangularly shaped holes inside the struts were generated during the pyrolysis of polyurethane sponge as a sacricial template, which lead to limite the strength of the reticulated foam as well as cracks. However, several attempts have been focused on the increasing the strut thickness. Here, we have prepared ceramic foams by the polyurethane sponge replication method with roller squeezing. Ceramic slurry including additives was determined with consideration of its viscous behavior. After pre-sintering, infiltration under vacuum was conducted. Metakaolin slurry was filled partially into the triangular void. As a result, the compression strength was improved by structure modification without composition change.

The vacuum infiltration method is one of the composite producing methods. There are several parameters in composite production by vacuum infiltration. One of them is particle size of reinforcement in particulate reinforced composites. In this study, MgO powder and Al were used as reinforcement and matrix respectively. MgO powders with different size and amount to give same height were filled in quartz tubes and liquid metal was vacuum infiltrated into the MgO powder under same vacuum condition and for same time. Infiltration height was measured and microstructure and fracture behavior of composite were investigated. It has been found that infiltration height and fracture strength were increased with particulate reinforcement sizes. It has also been determined that molten metal temperature facilitates infiltration.

With the emergence of the 3D CAD, it is possible to create a physical part directly from a digital model by accumulating layers of a given material. The technology is being widely used for checking designs, to create master models for rapid tooling, and for reverse engineering. However, in general, a model created by rapid prototyping technology is made of soft material that cannot be used as mass prouduction hard tool. Newly developed powder casting is suitable for rapid-manufacturing metallic tools. Powder casting can serve as a promising rapid tooling method because of high density characteristics and low dimensional shrinkage below 0.1% during sintering and infiltration. Through this process, we have realized significant time and cost savings eliminating the expense of conventional prototype tooling process.

The effects of sonication and vacuum infiltration on transformation efficiency was investigated by using immature embryos of Korean wheat as explants. Two Agrobacterium tumefaciens strains, KYRT1 and EHA105, carrying pCAMBIA 1305.1 were used. Transformation efficiency was demonstrated by the detection of β-glucu-ronidase (GUS) activity. GUS expression showed clear difference among Korean wheat cultivars. Geurumil showed higher GUS expression efficiency 79.1~% compared with other cultivars. The effects of the duration of vacuum infiltration and sonication treatment showed a tendency high GUS expression efficiency by their combination. In comparison with other Agrobacterium strains, KYRT1 showed high efficiency in most Korean cultivars.