Microstructure and Permeability of Anisotropic Open-Cell Foams

Solid foams within open-cell structure have been used widely in mechanical, thermal and acoustical applications due to their functional properties such as lightweight, high surface area-to-volume ratio. The present paper investigates numerically the effect of microstructural properties of anisotropic random foams on the permeability. To this regard, we first employ molecular dynamics simulation to generate the Representative Volume Element (RVE) based on Voronoi tessellation, the RVEs presenting the structure of random foams are then used to compute the foam permeability behavior by solving the viscous problem. The obtained results reveal that the finite element computations agree well with both reference analytical model and experimental data. The anisotropy degree has a significant effect on the permeability of foams. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.