Some important properties of the metal foams that make them attractive materials for various purposes are their excellent stiffness to weight ratio (light-weight structure), ability to take up strain by crushing at controlled pressure (energy and impact absorption), order of magnitude higher damping capacity as compared to the solids (mechanical damping), higher natural flexural vibration frequencies (vibration control), reasonable sound absorbing capacity accompanied by durability and fire resistance (acoustic absorption), and, high area of contact accompanied by high thermal conductivity (heat exchanger). Often foam is joined or connected to cover sheets of the same metal and the whole part together is called a foam sandwich. Among all the metal foams aluminium metal foam has found the widest and diverse application. This article covers important recent literature on laser processing viz. laser forming, laser welding, laser cutting and laser additive manufacturing of metal foams. Prior to this, a link is established between foam/foam sandwich and laser processing techniques stating the limitations of other relatively more conventional processing techniques. Future research direction regarding different laser processing techniques using metal foams has also been outlined.

使金属泡沫成为各种用途的有吸引力的材料的一些重要性能是：优异的刚度与重量比（轻型结构），通过在受控压力下压碎来吸收应变的能力（能量和冲击吸收），数量级更高与固体相比的阻尼能力（机械阻尼），更高的自然挠曲振动频率（振动控制），合理的吸音能力以及耐用性和耐火性（吸声），以及接触面积大且导热率高（热量）交换器）。通常，泡沫会连接或连接到相同金属的盖板上，而整个零件在一起称为泡沫三明治。在所有金属泡沫中，铝金属泡沫已发现了最广泛和多样化的应用。本文涵盖了有关激光加工的重要近期文献，即。激光成型，激光焊接，激光切割和金属泡沫的激光增材制造。在此之前，在泡沫/泡沫夹层与激光加工技术之间建立了联系，阐明了其他相对更常规的加工技术的局限性。还概述了有关使用金属泡沫的不同激光加工技术的未来研究方向。