Estimating the Effective Elastic Parameters of Nodular Cast Iron from Micro-Tomographic Imaging and Multiscale Finite Elements: Comparison between Numerical and Experimental Results

Andre Pereira, Marcio Costa, Carla Anflor, Juan Pardal and Ricardo Leiderman - Engineering School, Fluminense Federal University, Brazil; Institute of Computing, Fluminense Federal University, Brazil; Group of Experimental and Computational Mechanics, University of Brasília, Brazil;

We describe in detail a methodology to estimate the effective elastic parameters of nodular cast iron, using micro-tomography in conjunction with multiscale finite elements. We discuss the adjustment of the image acquisition parameters, address the issue of the representative-volume choice, and present a brief discussion on image segmentation. In addition, the finite-element computational implementation developed to estimate the effective elastic parameters from segmented microstructural images is described, indicating the corresponding computational costs. We applied the proposed methodology to a nodular cast iron, and estimated the graphite elastic parameters through a comparison between the numerical and experimental results.

How Amira-Avizo Software is used

Direct volume rendering is a convenient way to explore micro-CT data. This method allows the analyst to study in detail the compositional variation in terms of connectivity, distribution, and relative density. 3-D image-analysis software (AVIZO, version 8.1) was used for visualization, image processing, and segmentation. (…)
For image filtering and segmentation, a commercially available imageprocessing package (AVIZO) was used, which is capable of rapidly handling 1024 × 1024 × 1024 voxel images using an ordinary personal computer (PC).