Simulation of elastic moduli for porous materials

Charles P. Ursenbach

A simulation method is employed to simulate elastic moduli of porous materials, including error estimation. The ratio of porous elastic moduli to their non-porous counterparts is obtained for isotropic skeletal materials with a Poisson's ratio of 0.25. Three cases are modeled: 1). The spherical pores are non-overlapping but otherwise randomly distributed spheres, 2) the spherical pores are randomly distributed (overlapping) spheres, and 3) the pores are exclusions created from randomly distributed, overlapping spheres of matrix material. In all cases the pores are empty and the spheres are uniform in size. The results show that Norris. differential effective medium theory describes overlapping spheres well, particularly compressional properties, and the Kuster-Toksz model is moderately accurate for non-overlapping spheres. The CPA gives the closest description of the spherical exclusions, but it is still poor.