A Model for the Design of a Pomelo Peel Bioinspired Foam

The structure of pomelo peel arouses research interest in recent years because of the outstanding damping and energy dissipating performance of the pomelo peel. Researchers found that pomelo peel has varying pore size through the peel thickness; the pore size gradient is one of the key reasons leading to superior energy dissipation performance of pomelo peel. In this paper, we introduce a method to model pomelo peel bioinspired foams with nonuniform pore distribution. We generate the skeletal open cell structure of the bioinspired foams using Voronoi tessellation. The skeleton of the bioinspired foams is built as three-dimension (3D) beam elements in a full-scale finite element model. The quasi-static and dynamic mechanical behaviors of the pomelo peel bioinspired foams could be derived through a finite element analysis (FEA). We illustrate our method using a case study of pomelo peel bioinspired aluminum foams under quasi-static compression and free fall impact circumstances. The case study results validate our method and demonstrate the superior impact resistance and damping behavior of bioinspired foam with gradient porosity for designers.