Abstract
Closed-cell aluminium foam was represented with a new type of repeating unit-cell (RUC) constructed from the tetrakaidecahedra structure. After that the thin shell geometrical parameters and material properties of aluminium foam were assigned to this unit-cell. Finite element studies were then conducted to evaluate the stiffness and mechanical response of this model under large strain. Our results are compared to cruciform-pyramidal and cubic-spherical unit-cell foam models that describe the load and global deformation response in-terms of unit-cell structure. We demonstrate that the plateau phase stress-strain characteristics of our model are more representative of real aluminium foam. It was also found that the crushing resistance and energy absorption capability of tetra kaidecahedral foam was higher than the cruciform-pyramidal and cubic-spherical foam models. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.