ABSTRACT
Open-cell foams are widely used as very light and highly thermo-conductivity materials in modern aviation, space, and car technologies. The microstructure of open-cell foams consists of a set of ligaments (random bar-like elements of the hard phase of the foam) connected to number of nodes. One of the main objectives of the theory of foams is to be able to predict the dependence of their mechanical and physical properties on a micro-structural level. For numerical simulations of foam properties, the finite element method (FEM) is widely used [1]. The first step in application of this approach is constructing the foam skeleton using statistical models of the foam’smicrostructure. As a rule, the Voronoi tessellation procedure is used to produce polyhedron cells inside a representative volume element (RVE) of the foam’smaterial. Every polyhedron edge is taken as a ligament axe and then, after defining the shapes of the ligaments, FEM is applied to calculate fields in the ligaments for the given conditions on the RVE boundary. The effective constants of the foams are obtained by averaging the detailed field and the flux of the field over the RVE.
