Strategies for numerical prediction of the uncertainty in the material response of solid foams

The present study is concerned with a numerical prediction of uncertainty effects in the macroscopic material response of solid foams and other cellular solids used as a lightweight material for reduction of the energy consumption in all fields of transport. Two different routes are proposed. In a first approach, a repeated analysis of small scale volume elements for the micro structure is performed. As an alternative, large scale representative volume elements for the micro structure are considered where the stochastic information is generated by applying the homogenization scheme to subsets (“testing volume elements”) defined by the individual cells or cell clusters