Foam materials are experiencing a great diffusion in the industrial field because of their numerous properties and adaptability to different purposes. At the same time, research efforts are addressed to define new fields of application and methodologies of foam simulation, capable of combining their behavior at macroscale to phenomena at microscale, i.e. ligaments level. In this paper, a FE beam modeling strategy for open-cell foams acting on different scales of analysis is described. At first, on the microscale, the definition of the fundamental Kelvin unit cell is outlined with a particular characterization of the intersection zone between ligaments, that is a critical issue to obtain an accurate simulation instrument. The repetition of the unit cell within the material domain allows to obtain the overall foam material and operate at the macroscale. The elastic properties at macroscale are derived by means of FE analysis and compared with both solid model and experimental results. The proposed simplified FE modeling, using equivalent beam elements having suitable mechanical characteristics, demonstrates high accuracy levels and substantially relieve the computational efforts required by the commonly employed solid models.

泡沫材料由于其众多的特性和对不同目的的适应性而在工业领域中正经历着巨大的普及。同时，致力于研究工作以定义泡沫模拟的新应用领域和方法，能够将其宏观行为与微观（即韧带水平）现象结合起来。在本文中，描述了作用于不同分析尺度的开孔泡沫的有限元束建模策略。首先，在微观尺度上，基本的开尔文晶胞的定义是用韧带之间交叉区域的特定特征来概述的，这对于获得精确的仿真仪器而言是一个关键问题。在材料域内单元晶格的重复允许获得整体泡沫材料并在宏观上操作。通过有限元分析得出宏观尺度上的弹性，并将其与实体模型和实验结果进行比较。所提出的简化的有限元建模，使用具有适当机械特性的等效梁单元，证明了较高的准确度，并大大减轻了通常采用的实体模型所需的计算工作。