Evaluation of elastic properties of interpenetrating phase composites by mesh-free method

Abstract

Interpenetrating phase composites can be defined as multiphase materials in which each phase is three-dimensionally interconnected throughout the structure. The unique geometry of the reinforcement offers improved combination of mechanical and physical properties. Over the years, a lot of efforts have been put to study these composites experimentally. However, due to the complexity in microstructure and randomness in behaviour of interpenetrating phase composite, the modelling of these composites has not been sufficiently studied so far. Therefore, in this study, two models, namely, unit cell and self-consistent models have been presented to find the elastic properties of interpenetrating phase composites. All influencing parameters such as volume fraction and random geometry are duly incorporated in these models. These models are analysed by a mesh-free method known as element-free Galerkin method. The effective properties of these composites are calculated by an effective medium approximation approach. The real microstructure of interpenetrating phase composites is partially interpenetrating and partially particulate in nature; hence, a control parameter has been included in the model to simulate this behaviour. The main feature of the proposed unit cell model is that it is easy to implement and less time consuming as compared to three-dimensional existing model and characterises all the governing features of interpenetrating phase composite microstructure.

Mechanical modeling based on numerical homogenization of an Al 2 O 3 /Al composite manufactured via binder jet printing

“…However, such ''voxels'' approach does not take into account the randomness of the microstructure [22]. Agarwal et al [23] used an effective mesh free method to describe IPCs. Kaminsky and Kleiber [24] modeled the randomness of an IPC using a two-step homogenization method.…”

Mesh‐free models for static analysis of smart laminated composite beams

“… incorporated the delta function property for constructing the shape functions of mesh‐free models (MFMs) for laminated composite plates. Mesh‐free method has even been applied to estimate the effective elastic properties of interpenetrating phase composites . Postbuckling analysis of functionally graded cylindrical shells and dynamic analysis of sandwich beams with functionally graded core were also studied by using mesh‐free methods .…”

Numerical analysis of elastic and elastoplastic behavior of interpenetrating phase composites

“…Previous work on this subject can be broadly classified into three categories, namely theoretical methods [7][8][9], experimental measurements [10,11] and computational simulations [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Because of the complex microstructure of the IPCs, an analytical method can hardly estimate the mechanical properties precisely.…”

“…With 2D mesoscopic model using the Voronoi tessellation technique, Wang et al [12] performed FE analysis on the representative volume element to study the mechanical properties of IPC. Singh et al [13,14] presented a 2D unit cell model to numerically simulate the elastoplastic behavior of IPC using the element free Galerkin method (EFGM). Senthil et al [15,16] used the random morphology description functions (RMDFs) to generate a so-called realistic random microstructure (2D) for computational analyses.…”