Three-dimensional microstructural modeling and homogenization of porous alumina with needle-like pores

In the development of functional ceramics, the study on the relation between the macroscopic properties and the microstructures has been a critical issue. However, it has not been made clear by many experimental works. On the other hand, this paper takes the computational mechanics approach using the homogenization method. To model the very complex microstructure architecture three-dimensionally, the image-based modeling technique is employed. A porous alumina with needle-like random pores with 3.1% porosity ratio is studied in this paper. The effect of the location of extracting the unit cell and its size on the homogenized elastic constants is investigated. Then, the predicted values were compared with the measured ones. As a result, a unit cell region expressed by one million voxel elements with 2 μm resolution provides very accurate prediction regardless of the location of the unit cell in the random microstructures. The error between the numerical prediction and the measurement is only 1%.