An anisotropic damage model of foams on the basis of a micromechanical description

The mechanical behavior of open-cell foams may be modeled either on a microscopic or a macroscopic scale. In the first case, the behavior of the individual cell walls is described by beam models, while in the second case a continuum mechanical approach is applied. Both approaches have different advantages: On the one hand, the microscopic approach allows for a simple formulation of the constitutive equations but requires detailed knowledge of the heterogeneous microstructure, e.g. geometrical data of the beams and of the topology, and becomes numerically expensive for large structures. On the other hand, the macroscopic approach leads to efficient computations but requires more complicated constitutive equations, if e.g. anisotropy is taken into account.