Assessment of space division strategies for generation of adequate computational models for solid foams

The present study is concerned with a competitive assessment of different strategies for the division of space in the generation of computational models for the microstructure of solid foams for a numerical analysis of their properties. The study includes the standard (?-) Voronoi procedure, the ?-Voronoi procedure, a Voronoi procedure in Laguerre geometry as well as a simple foam evolution strategy. In addition to the basic versions of the individual strategies, smoothing and optimization approaches are used for a further improvement of the generated computational models. The quality of the models is assessed in terms of two quantitative criteria where the first criterion is the Kelvin parameter whereas the second criterion is based on the error in the statistical cell size distribution compared to experimental observations reported in the literature. All strategies are applied to the simplified case of two-dimensional model foams. Nevertheless, the results can be generalized to the three-dimensional case in a straight forward manner.