Open-cell foam can be thought of as a network of interconnected struts. To study the contact stiffness behavior, one can imagine the foam boundary to be characterized by struts that are free at one end, while the base-end is connected to the interior of the foam. In previous studies, the base-end was assumed to be built into a rigid surface, i.e., the surface struts were constrained to have zero displacement where they would connect to the foam interior. In this study the assumption that the surface elements are built-in is relaxed by modeling the elastic behavior of the foam interior. The foam interior is modeled as a network of struts within a finite element formulation. The analysis is simplified by considering two-dimensional honeycomb structures. It is found that including the foam interior in the model results in a significant reduction in the predicted contact stiffness.
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