General Engineering; Numerical Analysis; Material science; Foam; Tomography; Boundary representation; Finite element methods
Abstract :
[en] The present article introduces an automated procedure to construct geometrical
Representative Volume Elements (RVE) of open-foam cellular materials from com-
puterized tomography (CT) images, with the final aim of generating meshable
geometries usable in the Finite Element Method (FEM) used in order to analyse their
mechanical behaviour. The methodology consists in growing and fitting a set of ellip-
soids to each of the foam cells. These ellipsoids are seeded by local maxima of the
distance to the struts obtained from computer tomography images. This methodol-
ogy is thus fully voxel-based and does not depend on any assumption about statistical
distributions of the foam cells. Therefore, it is able to reproduce an accurate geomet-
rical model of the foam’s microstructure and its possible irregularities. Moreover,
this procedure allows the processing of large 3D data sets that do not fit the random
access memory (RAM) by slicing it into smaller independent chunks. The effective-
ness of the proposed approach is illustrated by comparing it to FEM simulations for
which meshes are obtained from a feature reconstruction approach. Both FEM sim-
ulations are then compared with experimental results of uniaxial compressions of an
open foam.
Disciplines :
Mechanical engineering
Author, co-author :
Leblanc, Christophe ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Aérospatiale et Mécanique (A&M)
The research has been funded by the Actions de recherche concertées ARC 09/14-02 BRIDGING – From imaging to geometrical modeling of complex micro-structured materials: Bridging computational engineering and material science from the Direction générale de l’Enseignement non obligatoire de la Recherche scientifique, Direction de la Recherche scientifique, Communauté française de Belgique, and granted by the Académie Universitaire Wallonie-Europe and by the “F.R.SF. N.R.S. EnlightenIt project”, grant number PDR T.0038.16.
Computational resources have been provided by the supercomputing facilities of the Consortium des Équipements de Calcul Intensif en Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles (CECI) funded by the Fond de la Recherche Scientifique de Belgique (FRS-FNRS).
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