Aluminium (Al) alloy foam is an engineering material which has emerged in the automobile sector where crash energy absorption, vibration and sound damping and weight reduction are required. Al-alloy foam is a lightweight material providing high strength and stiffness at relatively low density. The paper aims to study the innovative approach of manufacturing AlSi10Mg foam. The low-density and high-strength Al-alloy foam (AlSi10Mg) is fabricated using the melt route process resulting in a density of 0.70–0.90 g/cm3. After that, square mild steel thin-walled empty tubes and Al-alloy foam-filled mild steel tubes are tested to study enhanced energy absorption characteristics. The tests are carried out on universal testing machine with strain rate 10/s. Al-alloy foam, AlSi10Mg, is assessed macroscopically and microscopically using field emission scanning electron microscope and energy-dispersive X-ray analysis. The experimental results indicate that foam-filled tubes feature more energy absorption than empty tubes at strain rate 10/s. © 2020, The Indian Institute of Metals - IIM.