•Discussion on metal foam heat exchangers for various energy-intensive industries.•Comprehensive review of particulate fouling through porous metal foams.•Proposition of oscillatory fluids as a heat exchanger fouling mitigation technique.•Numerical and experimental methods to investigate heat exchanger fouling. Curtailing the ever-increasing global energy demand remains an arduous challenge. The U.S. Energy Information Administration emphasized that the deployment of new heat exchanger technologies could revolutionize how industry uses energy. In this review, we highlight the significance of metal foam heat exchangers as an attractive alternative to traditional heat exchanger technologies. Research on metal foam heat exchangers is steadily gaining momentum. However, metal foam heat exchangers are highly susceptible to fouling which results in a myriad of issues such as low heat exchanger performance and high energy consumption. These issues are further compounded by the fact that the fundamental mechanisms governing particulate fouling in metal foam heat exchangers are poorly understood. As such, the overarching goal of reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions could be met by deploying energy-efficient heat exchanger technologies and also by gaining a solid comprehension of multiphase flows, heat transfer, and heat exchanger fouling mechanisms. The development of advanced numerical methods to unravel heat exchanger fouling mechanisms could pave the way for an optimized heat exchanger design with minimum energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. This paper provides researchers a review of the performance of metal foam heat exchangers for various industrial applications and the implications of particulate fouling on the thermal performance of metal foam heat exchangers.