Publications

Effect of Microstructure Constraints on the Homogenized Elastic Constants of Elastomeric Sylgard/GMB Syntactic Foam

Brown, Judith A.; Steck, Daniel S.; Brown, Judith A.; Long, Kevin N.

Previous numerical studies of Sylgard filled with glass microballoons (GMB) have relied on various microstructure idealizations to achieve a large range of volume fractions with high mesh quality. This study investigates how different microstructure idealizations and constraints affect the apparent homogenized elastic constants in the virgin state of the material, in which all GMBs are intact and perfectly bonded to the Sylgard matrix, and in the fully damaged state of the material in which all GMBs are destroyed. In the latter state, the material behaves as an elastomeric foam. Four microstructure idealizations are considered relating to how GMBs are packed into a representative volume element (RVE): (1) no boundary penetration nor GMB-GMB overlap, (2) GMB-GMB overlap, (3) boundary penetration, and (4) boundary penetration and GMB-GMB overlap. First order computational homogenization with kinematically uniform displacement boundary conditions (KUBCs) was employed to determine the homogenized (apparent) bulk and shear moduli for the four microstructure idealizations in the intact and fully broken GMB material states. It was found that boundary penetration has a significant effect on the shear modulus for microstructures with intact GMBs, but that neither boundary penetration nor GMB overlap have a significant effect on homogenized properties for microstructures with fully broken GMBs. The primary conclusion of the study is that future investigations into Sylgard/GMB micromechanics should either force GMBs to stay within the RVE fully and/or use periodic BCs (PBCs) to eliminate the boundary penetration issues. The implementation of PBCs requires the improvement of existing tools in Sandia’s Sierra/SM code.