A Comprehensive Evaluation of the Predictive Capabilities of Several Advanced Micromechanics Approaches

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to comprehensively evaluate predictive capability and efficiency of advanced micromechanics approaches such as generalized method of cells (GMC), the high fidelity generalized method of cells (HFGMC), and the variational asymptotic method for unit cell homogenization (VAMUCH) and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) based micromechanics approaches using representative examples of heterogeneous materials such as: 1. continuous fiber reinforced composite; 2. particle reinforced composite; 3. discontinuous fiber reinforced composite; 4. woven composite. The evaluation reveals that GMC experiences noticeable loss of accuracy in predicting effective properties and also ineffectively recovers the local stress fields in all cases. HFGMC shows good agreement compared to FEA and also better recovers the local stress fields while VAMUCH shows an excellent agreement with FEA for both effective properties prediction and local field recovery. The shear moduli prediction of FEA is noticed to converge to the prediction of VAMUCH as the number of unit cell increases particularly for 3D analysis. It is also found that GMC is computationally efficient however VAMUCH with fewer elements can better approximate effective properties with better efficiency.