Inverse engineering for innovate material : 3D reconstitution and simulation of aluminum foams

International audience; The inverse engineering of open-cell aluminum foams CAD were numerically investigated. The process is accomplished using mathematical programming MATLAB software. The basic principles are: first, in a certain range, a series of objects (spheres or ellipsoids) is randomly generated. The positions and sizes of the objects are both random. It is found that the mechanical parameters, such as collapse stress and absorbed energy, are dependent on the porosity of aluminum foams. A macroscopic model was chose to predict the compression behavior of open-cell foams. The procedure integrates Explicit solver of ABAQUS, OPTIFORM mesher and python script program transfer to execute step by step the incremental deformation process. At each step, the meshes are refined and coarsened automatically based on geometrical and physical error estimations; the physical fields are transferred from old to the new one using advanced algorithm.