Mechanical properties of open cell foams: Simulations by Laguerre tesselation procedure

The Laguerre tessellation procedure is used for simulation of microstructures of open-cell foams. In contrast with the conventional Voronoii tessellation, the Laguerre one permits to simulate the foam microstructures with a given law of distribution of cell diameters. An original finite element method is developed for calculating the elastic properties: the ligaments are modelled as Timoshenko beams and each ligament is treated as one finite element. The size of the representative volume element for reliable calculations of the effective elastic properties is evaluated by computational experiments. Dependence of the properties on the cell size distributions and ligament shapes are analyzed.