A novel 3D geometrical reconstruction method for aluminum foams and FEM modeling of the material response

A novel method for modeling cellular materials is proposed based on MATLAB image processing and synchrotron X-ray computed tomography scanning to obtain an accurate calculation result of aluminum foam based on finite element model. The maximum entropy algorithm is employed to obtain the binarization image, and the median filtering algorithm is used to reduce the noise after binarization. The external contour and internal pores boundary is extracted by the “edge” function in MATLAB, and the geometrical model is reconstructed. A two-step mesh algorithm is adopted to mesh the reconstructed geometrical model. Accordingly, the finite element model of aluminum foam is established by the proposed method based on reconstruction geometrical model. The compression behavior of aluminum foam is obtained at 25°C, 100°C, 200°C by ABAQUS, and good agreements with experiments are achieved by applying the present reconstruction algorithm and modeling method.