Mote3D is an adaptable open-source software toolbox for the generation of random particulate microstructure models with periodic boundaries. Mote3D can be used to generate models that represent the microstructure of various inhomogeneous engineering materials such as particle-reinforced composites, partially sintered ceramics, powders or open-cell foams. These models can be employed, for example, to analyse the relation between microstructure and overall mechanical, electrical or thermal properties by virtual material testing.
The Mote3D toolbox works by randomly positioning spherical particles with user-defined minimum inter-particle distance in a cubical computational domain. The generated microstructure models can be exported in different formats, either as lists of particle centre coordinates and radii or as input scripts for generating solid geometric models or regular hexahedral meshes (voxel meshes) in the commercial finite-element software Abaqus™ or similar preprocessors.
Mote3D requires GNU Octave. Additional information on how to set up and run Mote3D can be found in the Mote3D User Guide. Further details on the implementation and some case studies are outlined in this paper.
Mote3D is licensed under the GNU General Public License.