The ecological and economic pressures are pushing the sector of the automotive industry to use more and more structural component in polymers and composites. Polymeric foams are a solution to such structure lightening.
IPC, a Technical Center for plastic and composite materials, is funding a MAPMOD project to model at the mesoscale level the microstructure of polymeric foams generated from X-Ray tomography. Generated RVEs will be then simulated under various loading conditions. The purpose is to get a better understanding of the relationship between the microstructural morphology and the mechanical properties of the material.