How regularization improves modeling bioinspired composite materials

Abstract

Tessellation-based polyhedral microstructures derived from Voronoi and Laguerre constructions provide a realistic geometric foundation for modeling bioinspired organic-inorganic composites with interfacial fracture. However, even after extensive centroidal relaxation, such tessellations retain numerous lower-dimensional geometric degeneracies-very short edges and small or sliver-like faces-that severely hinder volumetric meshing and render large-scale cohesive-zone simulations computationally impractical. In this work, we employ a geometric regularization step that enforces a minimum admissible feature length prior to meshing and systematically quantify its impact on downstream performance in finite element discretization and cohesive fracture simulation. By eliminating geometric features below the prescribed length scale while preserving grain topology and morphology, the regularized tessellations exhibit sharply improved edge-length and face-diameter distributions and become readily meshable at practical resolutions. When applied to a 3D bioinspired organic-inorganic composite with cohesive interfaces, the regularized geometry reduces volumetric and cohesive element counts nearly fivefold and increases the explicit stable time increment by approximately four orders of magnitude, transforming an otherwise diverging analysis into a robust simulation that converges to the prescribed deformation. These results demonstrate that the prescribed geometric regularization step is not merely a preprocessing refinement but a critical enabling step for efficient and large-scale cohesive fracture simulations of tessellation-based bioinspired composites.