MEAN-FIELD BASED MICRO-MECHANICAL MODELLING OF SHORT WAVY FIBER REINFORCED COMPOSITES

Abstract

Eshelby based Mean-Field homogenization is an effective method for modelling the mechanical response of short fiber reinforced composites. These models and especially the Mori-Tanaka model have been successfully used in previous studies for predicting the overall composite mechanical response. The present work describes a method for extending Mean-Field methods to discontinuous wavy fiber reinforced composites, including calculating local stresses in the fibers. The method involves discretization of a wavy fiber into smaller segments and replacing the original segments with an equivalent ellipsoids system which can be solved with Eshelby concept. The focus of this work is the validation of the local stress fields in fibers using Finite Element benchmarks of original Volume Elements (VEs) of wavy fibers. This validation is an essential basis for further accurate modeling of the damage behavior (i.e. debonding, fiber fracture) of discontinuous wavy fiber composites.

Keywords

• A. Discontinuous reinforcement; 
• C. Computational modelling; 
• C. Micro-mechanics; 
• C. Finite element analysis (FEA)

Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359835X16300392