Estudio de herramientas CAD asociadas a la simplificación de mallas para análisis de elementos finitos en geometrías altamente complejas.

The interesting properties of metal foams such as light weight, good energy absorption and low thermal conductivity, have promoted new process developments that allows increasing the properties quality without sacrificing productivity. In order to validate if the use of a minimum volume could be representative of the foam behavior for further mechanical properties analysis with computational numerical models, this study is focused to validate the cell distribution homogeneity of an aluminum alloy foam obtained by casting and dissolution process, using a statistical experiment. In this way, it was possible to determine that all parts of the sample have the equivalent superficial area and volume. Key Words: Metal foam, Casting and dissolution process, Pore distribution, Statistical experiment, 3D reconstruction.