A rigid-inclusion model for fiber-reinforced composites by fast multipole hybrid boundary node method

Abstract

A hybrid boundary node method for mechanical analysis of fiber-reinforced composites based on a rigid-inclusion model is proposed. Numerical simulation for fiber-reinforced composites usually demands extremely large and expensive computer resources. In a fiber-reinforced composite, the fibers have much higher values of stiffness compared with the matrix. In this case, the fibers can be considered as rigid ones and it can significantly reduce the computational scale for the analysis. In fact, the matrix is the only elastic domain which needs to be modeled in the proposed modeling, while the fibers are treated as rigid inclusions with only six rigid-body displacements. The fast multipole method is coupled with the rigid model to further reduce the computational time for large scale computation. Numerical examples demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach.