Effective elastic properties of periodic irregular open-cell foams

Abstract

This paper presents a micromechanical modeling for predicting the effective linear elastic properties of irregular open-cell foams using the periodic computational homogenization method. The tomography images are analyzed to obtain the morphological description of the irregular open-cell structure. An approach based on Voronoi diagram is used to generate realistic periodic foam structures with the morphological parameters. Hill’s lemma computational homogenization approach is performed to predict the effective elastic properties. In this paper, we focus especially on the determination of the Representative Volume Element (RVE) and the importance of choosing the RVE parameters, i.e. the number of realizations and the volume of RVE, on the accuracy of models. The efficiencies of different approaches are discussed. Some recommendations and improvements are proposed.