Application of Substructure Techniques to Syntactic Metal Foams in a Finite Element Environment

Abstract

The presented work focuses on the development of a novel method that can numerically describe the properties of metal matrix syntactic foam (MMSF) with low memory requirements and short computational times without losing the properties of the interior structure. In this paper, we propose a novel method that avoids using the homogenization technique and instead rearranges stiffness matrices and constructs specific substructures to perform the overall construction. The two-dimensional cases are discussed in order to focus on the methodology itself. First, the reductions and structural design with solid mesh structures were performed, and then the model was applied on structures filled with iron hollow spheres. So far, the method has been used to evaluate small deformations to see how suitable the subspace technique is for describing metal foams. Aluminum was used as the matrix material, as it is one of the most common materials for MMSFs. The optimal parameters were searched that resulted in the shortest running time for the given construction. Since in the proposed substructure technique only the displacement values at the boundary points are computed, a back-calculation step for each selected substructure was performed to see the interior deformations in the vicinity of an iron hollow sphere.