A comparison between tomographic and generated open cell metal foam structures

Abstract: This master thesis project presents steps on the image processing and reconstruction of an aluminium open-cell metal foam from $\mu$CT tomographic data. In addition, it also considers the generation of architecture foams using Voronoi Tessellation in combination with sphere packing algorithms. The process creates a foam skeleton which is used together with morphological operations such as dilation and hole closing with the purpose of obtaining a foam model. A parametric study is performed to observe the influence of the sphere packing input parameters on the architecture foam model. The final architecture models are similar both visually and geometrically to the reconstructed model. However, it is noted that a more complex image morphology might be required. The finite element meshing of both reconstructed and generated metal foams is also performed. By comparison it is shown how the temperature distribution differs between the foam models as opposed to a solid metal.