Numerical investigation of composite metal foams using substructure techniques

• The substructure technique can be used for modelling synthetic metal foams. • The substructure technique is well adapted to linear material models. • It is easy to build an inhomogeneous finite element model from substructures. • The stress in the matrix material is strongly influenced by the filling percentage. An accurate description of the mechanical behaviour of inhomogeneous, anisotropic composite materials, such as metal matrix syntactic foams (MMSFs), is a challenging task. This paper is based on the so-called substructure technique, which has never been used for the mechanical modelling of metal foams or MMSFs. Using this method, a finite element model with low computational requirements but still modelling inhomogeneous properties can be constructed that reproduces the results of laboratory measurements with high accuracy. In all cases, the tests presented in this paper are limited to the linearly elastic phase. As the most common investigation of MMSFs is the compression test, this study considers only this loading case. A more detailed discussion of the stress analysis of MMSFs is given at the end of this work. A potential cause of 45° crack planes during compression tests and the evolution of stresses as a function of space-filling are also investigated.