Efficient computation of cellular materials using the finite cell method

The application of cellular materials in lightweight structures is a subject of growing interest. As meshing with surface aligned elements is very time consuming and entails a lot of degrees of freedom, we apply the finite cell method (FCM). The FCM is an extension of the known fictitious domain methods based on using high order polynomials for the Ansatz functions. In order to obtain a realistic representation of the geometry, we derive our discretization directly from the voxel data coming from the computer tomography (CT-scan) of the specimen of interest. Thus, a much coarser Cartesian grid consisting of hexahedral cells can be readily generated in a fully automated fashion. (© 2014 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)