Hyperelastic behaviors of closed-cell porous materials at a wide porosity range

Abstract

In this paper, the constitutive model proposed in the previous work for neo-Hookean materials with spherical voids and an explicit homogenization solution named Shrimali-Lefèvre-Lopez (SLL) model for isotropic porous elastomers are adopted to theoretically predict the macroscopic effective hyperelastic responses of the closed-cell porous materials with rubber-like incompressible neo-Hookean matrix at finite deformations. Representative volume element (RVE) models with randomly distributed non-overlapping polyhedral voids are employed to numerically validate the theoretical models at a wide porosity range from 0.05 to 0.9. Various deformations including hydrostatic deformations, pure shear deformations, uniaxial deformations and plane strain deformations are applied to the theoretical and RVE models. The results show that the theoretical models can well estimate the effective hyperelastic properties of the porous materials under all deformation conditions considered, and our theoretical model is complementary with the SLL model for predicting different effective properties under given deformation. The constitutive models are also validated experimentally by comparing with the experimental data from the literature.