On the microstructure of open-cell foams and its effect on elastic properties
By W. Jang, A. Kraynik, S. Kyriakides. 2008
379 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Synthetic open-cell foams have a complex microstructure consisting of an interconnected network of cells resulting from the foaming process. The cells are irregular polyhedra with anywhere from 9 to 17 faces in nearly monodisperse foams. The material is concentrated in the nearly straight ligaments and in the nodes where they intersect. The mechanical properties of such foams are governed by their microstructure and by the properties of the base material. In this study micro-computed X-ray tomography is used to develop 3D images of the morphology of polyester urethane and Duocel aluminum foams with different average cell sizes. The images are used to establish statistically the cell size and ligament length distributions, material distributions along the ligaments, the geometry of the nodes and cell anisotropy. The measurements are then used to build finite element foam models of increasing complexity that are used to estimate the elastic moduli. In the most idealized model the microstructure is represented as a regular Kelvin cell. The most realistic models are based on Surface Evolver simulations of random soap froth with N 3 cells in spatially periodic domains. In all models the cells are elongated in one direction, the ligaments are straight but have a nonuniform cross sectional area distribution and are modeled as shear deformable beams. With this input both the Kelvin cell models and the larger random foam models are shown to predict the elastic moduli with good accuracy but the random foams are 5–10% stiffer.
Subfields: Mechanical Engineering, Polymers and Plastics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/04ea2e762813e70a9c79671be158d62e0726d8ca
How researchers see this paper
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In Mechanical Engineering
- Norman A. Fleck
- V. Deshpande
- H. Wadley
- J. W. Hutchinson
- A. G. Evans
- Zhenyu Xue
- C. Steeves
- D. Radford
In Polymers and Plastics
- A. Barros-Timmons
- Artur Ferreira
- Norman A. Fleck
- N. Gama
- V. Deshpande
- H. Wadley
- J. W. Hutchinson
- Zhenyu Xue
Citations in the corpus
- A micromechanical model for the Young’s modulus of adipose tissue (2010, background): “We note in passing that the morphology of the septa fibres resembles that of polymeric and metallic foams, see for example Jang et al. (2008).”
- Polyurethane Foams: Past, Present, and Future (2018, background): “rese tatio of eat transfer echanis in poly eric foa s (adapted from [207]).”