Application of Voronoi tessellations to model cellular aerogels

Abstract

Many aerogels are characterized by a fibrillar morphology. Recently proposed constitutive models have shown good predictive capabilities in describing the mechanical behavior of such aerogels. On the one hand, these models account for the cellular nature and adhere to the cell-size distributions, while on the other hand they are based on the assumption of the network made up of idealized square-shaped cells. The heterogeneous cellular morphology of aerogels can computationally be described by a Voronoi tessellation based approach. Accordingly, the random cell shapes within the network are accounted for by means of the pore-size distribution data obtained from experiments. To this end, 2-d and 3-d periodic representative volume elements (RVEs) are generated from the cellular structure obtained using Voronoi tessellations and simulated under compression using finite element analysis.