Finite element modelling of high-porosity open-cell metal foams using a digital framework

Recently, metal foams are becoming popular in engineering due to their superior material properties, such as high stiffness with low specific weight and high compression strength with good energy absorption characteristics. Metal foams can be characterised by their cells or pores geometrically, such as their size, shape, spatial distribution, and regular/irregular/random arrangement. Apart from experimental study on metal foams, numerical modelling and simulations have been widely used to represent, fabricate, and characterise metal foams digitally in a material design sense. Most of metal foams have randomly-distributed structures, which create barriers for numerical modelling of such materials and their finite element analysis. As a result, various representative structures have been developed to model them. In this research, 2-D hexogen and 3-D Weaire-Phelan models are developed to model the open cell foams with random cell distributions. This devised 2-/3-D digital framework includes digital material representation and fabrication, finite element model generation and finite element analysis-based characterisation. For validation, the numerical results obtained from the numerical models are compared with those from experimental work and good agreements are found which demonstrates the effectiveness of the digital framework developed for metal foams.