Titanium foam is a kind of complex foam structure composed of hole and titanium hole skeleton. This novel metal foam material possesses the dual properties of foam structure and titanium, showing excellent properties such as light weight, high strength, sound absorption, heat insulation, vibration reduction, damping, absorbing shock energy and electromagnetic shielding. It has aroused numerous attention because it can be used not only as structural material but also as functional material. However, titanium oxide on the surface of titanium foam is extremely stable, which blocks its extensive applications. Taking titanium foam as a precursor, the surface modification technologies including hydrothermal method, anodization method and electrodeposition method are employed to obtain the loadings with adjustable composition, morphology and structure. Surface modification can not only preserve the characteristics of porous structure of titanium foam matrix, but also effectively improve its surface activity and electrical conductivity, which has become a research focus of this field in recent years. Meanwhile, titanium foam can merely offer limited performance (such as capacitance and catalytic perfor-mance), due to the single structure and composition of its surface load, which hinders the further development of applications. Accordingly, in addition to the preparation of various types of surface loads on titanium foam, great efforts have also been made to prepare diverse loading materials with outstanding performance in various applications based on the composition and structure of titanium foam surface loads. As an excellent application material, supported titanium foam primarily consists of nano TiO2, metal catalyst and conductive polymer, with diverse structure including tubular, linear, flower-like, granular and hollow structures. Supported titanium foam exhibits high specific surface area and internal pore structure, it is also endowed with the characteristics of high conductivity, catalysis, hydrophilicity and adsorption of surface loads, which contributes to better performance of the titanium foam. Among them, TiO2/titanium foam material bear nano structure and is capable of providing excellent capacity and catalytic performance, which is generally superior to other loads. Based on the structural composition, a variety of loaded titanium foam materials with different structural composition have been prepared in recent years by adjusting modification approaches or reaction conditions. On the one hand, some of the obtained loaded titanium foam with certain structure can relieve the impact of the the material in service, resulting in an improved cyclic performance. On the other hand, by regulating the structure of surface load of titanium foam, its activity can be fully exposed and its performance can be maximized. Based on the previous research work, we reviews the progress of supported titanium foam, including modification methods, composition cha-racteristics, structural regulation and its application in electrochemical energy storage and environmental catalysis. In the end, we point out the current challenges and future development prospects in the field of supported titanium foam. © 2019, Materials Review Magazine. All right reserved.
