Abstract
This paper focuses on the computational modeling of the effective elastic properties of irregular closed-cell foams. The recent Hill’s lemma periodic computational homogenization approach is used to predict the effective elastic properties. Three-dimensional (3D) rendering is reconstructed with the tomography slices of the real irregular closed-cell foam. Its morphological description is analysed to generate realistic numerical closed-cell structures by the Voronoi-based approach. The influences of the Representative Volume Element (RVE) parameters (i.e., the number of realizations and the volume of RVE) and the relative density on the effective elastic properties are studied. Special emphasis is placed on the appropriate choice of boundary conditions. Satisfying agreements between the homogenized results and the experimental results are observed.
Highlights
In recent years, cellular media such as plastic, ceramic, and metal foams have attracted more and more attention thanks to their interesting mechanical properties [1,2,3,4,5] and thermal properties [6,7,8,9,10].Concerning the elastic behavior of closed-cell foams, different isotropic random closed-cell foam models based on Voronoi tessellations and level-cut Gaussian random fields have been generated [11].The density and microstructure dependence of the Young’s modulus and Poisson’s ratio have been computed
Yu and Tang [34] proposed a method named the variational asymptotic method for unit cell homogenization (VAMUCH) in which a variational statement is formulated with an asymptotic expansion of the energy functional
Using the approach based on Voronoi diagram, realistic irregular closed-cell foam structures were numerically generated with the morphological parameters
Summary
Cellular media such as plastic, ceramic, and metal foams have attracted more and more attention thanks to their interesting mechanical properties [1,2,3,4,5] and thermal properties [6,7,8,9,10]. Yu and Tang [34] proposed a method named the variational asymptotic method for unit cell homogenization (VAMUCH) in which a variational statement is formulated with an asymptotic expansion of the energy functional Inspired by this VAMUCH method, Zhu et al [25] recently proposed a micromechanical modeling approach based on Hill’s lemma to determine the effective elastic properties of open-cell foams. These two approaches have the advantages that with only one finite element computation, one can obtain the effective properties without imposing any specific boundary loadings or averaging the local fields. The homogenized results are compared with the results of the tomography reconstruction model and the experimental results
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