The macroscopic mechanical behavior of open-porous cellular materials is dictated by the geometric and material properties of their microscopic cell walls. The overall compressive response of such materials is divided into three regimes, namely, the linear elastic, plateau and densification. In this paper, a constitutive model is presented, which captures not only the linear elastic regime and the subsequent pore-collapse, but is also shown to be capable of capturing the hardening upon the densification of the network. Here, the network is considered to be made up of idealized square-shaped cells, whose cell walls undergo bending and buckling under compression. Depending on the choice of damage criterion, viz. elastic buckling or irreversible bending, the cell walls collapse. These collapsed cells are then assumed to behave as nonlinear springs, acting as a foundation to the elastic network of active open cells. To this end, the network is decomposed into an active network and a collapsed one. The compressive strain at the onset of densification is then shown to be quantified by the point of intersection of the two network stress-strain curves. A parameter sensitivity analysis is presented to demonstrate the range of different material characteristics that the model is capable of capturing. The proposed constitutive model is further validated against two different types of nanoporous materials and shows good agreement.
Keywords: cell wall mechanics; cellular material; constitutive model; densification; pore-collapse.