An efficient and automated 3D FE approach to evaluate effective elastic properties of overlapping random fibre composites

Abstract

The paper deals with an automated and double-scale finite element (FE) model to evaluate the effective elastic properties of 3D overlapping random fibre composites. An efficient and perfectly reliable approach to generate meshes in the context of random heterogeneous media for which some difficulties are encountered, is proposed. The basic idea is to attain an approximation of the geometry relative to a grid of regular hexahedral elements. The concept called voxelisation is tremendously sped up using an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) which enables one to locally and efficiently smooth each heterogeneity. Thus, a fast, reliable and fully automated generation of representative volume elements (RVE) is possible whatever the complexity of the geometry is. In the present work, algorithms to generate RVE according to the concept of voxelisation are provided. In addition, numerical tests are performed to evaluate both the efficiency of the model and the reliability of the results in the framework of linear elasticity and random fibre composites.