A method for characterisation of the static elastic properties of the porous frame of orthotropic open-cell foams

This paper proposes a method to identify the static, fully relaxed elastic Hooke’s matrix of a porous open-cell material. The moduli are estimated through an inverse estimation method, by performing a fit of a numerical model on the measured displacements on the faces of the porous material. These displacements are obtained from a static compression along each of the three coordinate axes. The material is modelled as an orthotropic equivalent solid, of which the principal directions are not necessarily aligned with the orthonormal coordinate system in which the experiments are conducted. The angles of relative orientation accounting for the misalignment are among the properties to be estimated. The focus in this paper is on the methodology itself, and its validity is verified by applying the method to four artificial materials with different levels of anisotropy. In addition, the robustness of the method to perturbations on the input data is investigated.