Deformation kinetics of a process modelled foam

Polymeric foams are a class of cellular materials that is used in various applications. Amongst other things it is used for packaging purposes to make sure the item being shipped remains undamaged.

For this purpose is important to know the deformation kinetics of the foam. Unfortunately these kinetics are very dependent on the microstructure and can therefore not be described as easily as for example the kinetics of a metal.

Therefore, first in this project the expansion process of a polymer fluid is modelled to obtain a random microstructure. Then a compression test simulation is applied on this microstructure to obtain a stress-strain curve.

The goal is to obtain agreement between the stress-strain curves obtained from the simulations with stress-strain curves obtained from real experiments