Compressive properties of lotus-type porous iron

Lotus-type porous materials exhibit some unique anisotropic mechanical and thermal properties which are very useful for a number of industrial applications. This paper evaluates several computational models for determining the compressive engineering elastic modulus and engineering yield stress of lotus-type iron in transversal and longitudinal direction in regard to pore orientation with parametric nonlinear finite element computational simulations for porosities ranging from 0 to 0.65. The considered pore topologies of evaluated computational models are either regular (indirectly reconstructed) or irregular (directly reconstructed). Comparison of computational results, experimental tests and analytical estimations shows good correlation of some evaluated computational models. The simplified porous model with pi/4 rotated aligned regular pores can be recommended for fast computational estimation of lotus-type material behaviour under mechanical loading, when some material parameters for homogenised lotus-type material modelling have to be determined. Crown Copyright (c) 2012 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.