Elastic properties of Laguerre approximations of random foams

Abstract

Stochastic models are valuable tools to study the mechanical behaviour of foams whose characteristic features include random cellular morphology and cells of different size (polydispersity). Random Laguerre tessellations, additively weighted generalisations of Voronoi tessellations, possess these features which makes them natural models for foams. This work studies how well a random foam can be represented by a Laguerre tessellation. For this means the Surface Evolver is used to simulate random, polydisperse soap froths which are subsequently reconstructed by Laguerre tessellations. By design, the resulting Laguerre approximations resemble the cellular morphology of the underlying froth. The Young’s modulus of low-density solid foams with open cells is then calculated for random, polydisperse foams based on Laguerre approximations and simulated soap froths. For the special case of monodisperse foams, we compare Laguerre approximated foams with the well known Kelvin and Weaire–Phelan foams.