This paper presents an incremental secant mean-field homogenization (MFH) procedure for composites made of elasto-plastic constituents. In this formulation, the residual stress and strain states reached in the elasto-plastic phases upon a fictitious elastic unloading are considered as starting point to apply the secant method. The mean stress fields in the phases are then computed using secant tensors, which are naturally isotropic and enable to define the Linear-Comparison-Composite. The method, which remains simple in its formulation, is valid for general non-monotonic and non-proportional loading. It is applied on various problems involving elastic, elasto-plastic and perfectly-plastic phases, to demonstrate its accuracy compared to other existing MFH methods.

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In this work, a gradient-enhanced homogenization procedure is proposed for fiber reinforced materials. In this approach, the fiber is assumed to remain linear elastic while the matrix material is modeled as elasto-plastic coupled with a damage law described by a non-local constitutive model. Toward this end, the mean-field homogenization is based on the knowledge of the macroscopic deformation tensors, internal variables and their gradients, which are applied to a micro-structural representative volume element (RVE). The macro-stress is then obtained from a homogenization procedure. The methodology holds for 2-phase composites with moderate fiber volume ratios, and for which, at the RVE size, the matrix can be considered as homogeneous isotropic and the ellipsoidal fibers can be considered as homogeneous transversely isotropic. Under these assumptions, the method is successfully applied to simulate the damage process occurring in unidirectional carbon-fiber reinforced epoxy composites submitted to different loading conditions.

The failure of carbon fiber reinforced epoxy laminates is studied using an anisotropic gradient-enhanced continuum damage model embedded in a mean-field homogenization scheme. In each ply, a homogenized material law is used to capture the intra-laminar failure. The anisotropy of the homogenized material model results from the homogenization method and from the reformulation of the non-local continuum damage theory to account for the material anisotropy. As a result the damage propagation direction in each ply is predicted with accuracy as compared to the experimental results, while the problems of losing uniqueness and strain localization, which occur in classical finite element simulations when strain softening of materials is involved, can be avoided. To model the delamination process, the hybrid discontinuous Galerkin/extrinsic cohesive law method is introduced at the ply interfaces. This hybrid method avoids the need to propagate topological changes in the mesh with the propagation of the delamination while it preserves the consistency and stability in the un-cracked interfaces. As a demonstration, open-hole coupons with different stacking sequences are studied numerically and experimentally. Both the intra-and inter-laminar failure patterns are shown to be well captured by the computational framework.