2-/3-D digital material representation and evaluation of metal foams

Chunhui Yang¹, Yang An², Ryan Greenfield¹, Peter Hodgson²

¹School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics, University of Western Sydney, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia.
²Institute for Frontier Materials, Deakin University, Waurn Ponds, VIC 3217, Australia.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7494/cmms.2013.4.0463

Abstract:

Recently metal foams are becoming popular in engineering application due to their high energy absorption ability and low density, which are being utilised in automotive engineering and aerospace engineering as well as biomedical engineering. As a typical porous or cellular material, from the material design’s point of view, metal foams have typical heterogeneous structures crossing length scales, which can be defined by only two phases: matrix material and voids. The voids are termed as cells or pores. Their structures can be characterised by several main geometric parameters related to the cells, such as size, shape, spatial distribution and arrangement and so on. The digital material representation (DMR) of metal foams has been employed to represent metal foams accounting for their complex structures. However random distributions of the size and shape of cells in most foam materials make the digital material representation and modelling of such materials very complicated. Furthermore, effects of size and shape of cells on mechanical behaviours of metal foams have been found and investigated numerically and experimentally in authors’ previous studies in which the authors have developed a digital framework for the representation, modelling and evaluation of multi-phase materials including metal foams. In this study, the developed digital framework for the representation, modelling and evaluation of microstructured or multi-phase materials has been further developed with a multi-scale sense including both two-/three-dimensional (2-/3-D) finite element modelling to represent metal foams with a certain distribution on cell size and shape, which can be used for digital or virtual testing to determine mechanical properties and behaviours of such foams. A linkage between 2-D and 3-D finite element models has been built up through a comparativeness analysis between them. For validation and verification purpose, the results obtained from these models have been compared with those from experimental work and good agreement has been found which demonstrated the effectiveness of the digital framework developed for metal foams.

Cite as:

Yang, C., An, Y., Greenfield, R., & Hodgson, P. (2013). 2-/3-D digital material representation and evaluation of metal foams. Computer Methods in Materials Science, 13(4), 425 – 435. https://doi.org/10.7494/cmms.2013.4.0463

Article (PDF):

Keywords:

Metal foams, Mechanical behaviour, Digital material representation, Finite element modelling, Virtual testing

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