Role of cell regularity and relative density on elasto-plastic compression response of random honeycombs generated using Voronoi diagrams

The Voronoi tessellation technique and solid modeling methods are used in this work to create virtual random structures and link cell morphology with the mechanical behavior. Their compression responses are analyzed using the finite element method. First, the effect of loading direction is analyzed for structures with different levels of randomness characterized by a regularity parameter to assess the degree of scatter in the results. Subsequently, morphological characteristics such as arrangement of cells and randomness are analyzed separately. The effect of relative density on structures with different levels of randomness is also studied. Simulations suggest that at low relative densities the arrangement of cells has a negligible effect on the compression response of random honeycombs. On the contrary, the cellular randomness has significant influence on the elastic and plastic characteristics especially when fully random structures are compared with the regular counterparts.