A new approach for irregular porous structure modeling based on centroidal voronoi tessellation and B-spline

Abstract

Porous structure is a particular type of solid with pores. Different pore parameters, such as size, shape, porosity, and pore interconnection, lead to diverse porous structures. Compared to conventional solids, porous structures possess many superior properties including lower density, lower thermal conductivity, lower stiffness, lower strength, larger compressive strain, and larger surface areas. In recent years, porous structures have been widely utilized into the areas of tissue engineering, energy absorbers, thermal insulators, and lightweight structures. The wide applications of porous structures have attracted a lot of attention on porous structure modeling. Computer-Aided Design (CAD) plays an important role on this research topic because of the easy manipulation and user-friendly interactions of CAD packages, as well as the advanced Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies that transform complex CAD models into valid products. Among various theories and approaches for porous structure modeling in CAD, the unit cell method is one of the most broadly adopted. Armed with a library of primitive cell structures and automatic assembly strategies, unit cell methods provide a powerful tool for both 2D and 3D porous structure modelling. However, these methods are hampered by their poor capacities to exhibit pore diversity in both size and morphology.