Elastic percolation of composite structures with regular tessellations of microstructure

Abstract

Enhancing the mechanical properties of materials by adding inclusions (particles) into microstructure is a favorite research area for material science researchers. In this paper, effects of different geometrical shapes of inclusions on overall elastic properties of a microstructure with regular tessellations were investigated. Finite element method (FEM) was used to analyze the stretching and shearing behavior of the microstructure including particles with different geometrical shapes. The results show that the dependency of tensile and shearing properties of the microstructure on volume fraction of particles can completely have different trends in some ranges of volume fractions. Besides, it was observed that each regular tessellation can have a different effect in enhancement of mechanical properties. Also the effects of mechanical percolation on the elastic properties of microstructures were investigated. The presented approach opens a systematic method for investigating the enhanced properties of microstructures with different shapes of tessellations.