In the current digital age, it is befitting that complex heterogeneous materials, such as solid propellants, are characterized by digital computational and/or experimental techniques. Of those, micro computer tomography (micro-CT) and advanced packing algorithms are the most popular for identifying the statistics of multimodal, random, particulate composites. In this work, we develop a procedure for the characterization and reconstruction of periodic unit cells of highly filled, multimodal, particulate composites from a packing algorithm. Rocpack, a particle packing software, is used to generate the solid propellant microstructures and one-, two-and three-point probability functions are used to describe their statistical morphology. However, both the experimentally scanned or computationally designed packs are usually non optimal in size and likely too big to be fully numerically resolved when complex nonlinear processes such as combustion, decohesion, matrix tearing, etc. are modeled. Thus, domain
Microstructural geometry plays a critical role in the response of heterogeneous materials. Consequently, methods for generating microstructural samples are increasingly crucial to advanced numerical analyses. We extend Sonon et al.'s unified framework, developed originally for generating particulate and foam-like microstructural geometries of Periodic Unit Cells, to non-periodic microstructural representations based on the formalism of Wang tiles. This formalism has been recently proposed in order to generalize the Periodic Unit Cell approach, enabling a fast synthesis of arbitrarily large, stochastic microstructural samples from a handful of domains with predefined microstructural compatibility constraints. However, a robust procedure capable of designing complex, three-dimensional, foam-like and cellular morphologies of Wang tiles has not yet been proposed. This contribution fills the gap by significantly broadening the applicability of the tiling concept.Since the original Sonon et al.'s framework builds on a random sequential addition of particles enhanced with an implicit representation of particle boundaries by the level-set field, we first devise an analysis based on a connectivity graph of a tile set, resolving the question where a particle should be copied when it intersects a tile boundary. Next, we introduce several modifications to the original algorithm that are necessary to ensure microstructural compatibility in the generalized periodicity setting of Wang tiles. Having established a universal procedure for generating tile morphologies, we compare strictly aperiodic and stochastic sets with the same cardinality in terms of reducing the artificial periodicity in reconstructed microstructural samples. We demonstrate the superiority of the vertex-defined tile sets for two-dimensional problems and illustrate the capabilities of the algorithm with two-and three-dimensional examples.
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