Effective Elastic Behavior of Irregular Closed-Cell Foams

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.

Keywords

• irregular closed-cell foams
• tomography
• periodic computational homogenization
• mechanical properties