ANALYSIS OF COMPOSITE-MATERIALS - A MICROMECHANICAL APPROACH

A micromechanical approach for predicting the overall elastic behavior, as well as thermal expansion coefficients, of composite materials is presented. The approach is based on modeling the composites with regular arrays of unit material cells, constructing a possible stress pattern for a considered representative cell, and then minimizing the complementary energy of the representative cell under given average stresses. The procedure is concise in concept, theoretically adaptable, and easy to conduct. Applications to unidirectionally fiber-reinforced composites and to some particulate composites are given. Good agreement with known theoretical/experimental results are shown.