ABSTRACT Pores and shrink holes are unavoidable defects in the aluminium die-casting mass production which may significantly influence the strength, fatigue and fracture behaviour as well as the life span of structures, especially if they are subjected to high static and dynamic loads [1]. Such defects should be considered during the design process or after production, where the defects could be detected with the help of computed tomography (CT) measurements. The paper deals with the stress analysis of die-cast structural parts with pores found from CT measurements or that are artificially placed within a structure. The pore data provided as STL data from the CT measurement device have to be repaired before they could be used as input data for the FCM analysis. The proposed approach is a combination of the finite cell method (FCM) with the classical finite element method (FEM). The FCM is only applied in regions with pores. This procedure has the advantage that all simulations with different pore distributions, real or artificial one, can be calculated without changing the base finite element mesh. The paper presents a methodology to apply the FCM within the commercial FEM software Abaqus. The coupling approach is presented and applied to test cases as well as to an industrial gear housing of an electric drive. REFERENCES [1] Cao, H., Luo, Z., Wang, C., Wang, J., Hu, T., Xiao, L. and Che, J.: The stress concentration mechanism of pores affecting the tensile properties in vacuum die casting metals, Materials, 2020, 13(13), 3019, 14 pp, doi: 10.3390/ma13133019. [2] Gabbert, U. and Würkner, M. (2021), “Simulation of cellular structures with a coupled FEM-FCM approach based on CT data”, Journal of Computational and Applied Mechanics, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 57–70, doi: 10.32973/jcam.2021.004.