Abstract
Recently, development of porous metal has been becoming active to meet the requirement of machinery industry as a high strength material in spite of its low–density. To evaluate its properties and quality, material testing is conducted, however, the evaluation simulated on a computer is much more efficient. In fact, converting a large piece of porous metal into digitized mesh data is significantly difficult because of its complex inner structure. X–ray computed tomography(CT) scanning technique enables us to obtain the information of internal structure. Furthermore, reconstruction algorithm produces volume data of test object. Generally, conventional methods are utilized to generate mesh data from volume data whose drawback is generating too much elements resulting in high computational cost. We propose an approach to generate hexahedral meshes particularly designed for porous structure by modeling each pore with spheres from volume data. Data conversion is conducted through a series of processing, which are labeling, spherical approximation, shape approximation, region segmentation and meshing. The result substantiates feasibility of proposed method that generates shape–approximated and finite–element–simulation–available mesh data with fewer elements.
