Fabrication, modelling and evaluation of microstructured materials in a digital framework

Microstructured materials are inhomogeneous at small length scales, where different constituents or phases can be distinguished and the evaluation on their material properties and mechanical behaviours is critical for the applications of such material in engineering. In this study, we develop a systematic digital framework for material representation, fabrication, modelling and characterisation to evaluate the material properties of microstructured multi-phase materials. As the core of this digital framework, a 2-/3-D finite element model generator is developed to create finite element (FE) models for microstructured materials and their meshes with self-developed codes and available scientific engineering software and packages, which can describe the microstructures in detail. For characterisation and evaluation purposes, the generated FE models are further equipped with appropriate boundary conditions based on practical experiments in laboratory. Then the well-established FE models can be run using commercial finite element analysis packages, i.e., Abaqus, to extract the information and data for material property evaluation for the materials of interest. As a case study, the proposed digital framework is applied to evaluate a typical closed-cell metal foam material and the results obtained show clearly cell size effect of foams on their mechanical behaviours which is validated by experimental data available.