Estimation and Experimental Validation of Mean-Field Homogenised Effective Properties of Composite

Abstract

For composite materials, the system response changes abruptly with a change in the properties of the material. Therefore, attaining significant knowledge about the effect of the material composition on the material properties is crucial. The researchers are looking for new computational methods which can predict these alterations so that the effort in experimental testing can be reduced. In this direction, this paper presents a robust and novel methodology of validating the estimation of the composite’s effective through a multi-scale approach by a set of standardized experimentation. These effective properties are estimated through the mean-field homogenization technique whose parameters are driven from the image analysis of Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) images. The predicted results are validated with the results obtained by the experimentation as per ASTM E1876 standard. The estimated error between the predicted properties and the experimental values increased with the increase of alumina particle fraction in the matrix. The mean-field homogenization lags behind the experiments for the parameters defined by the image analysis method than the experimental results. The upper bounds of the mean-field homogenization can be used for the composites with higher reinforcement volume fraction.