Evaluation of equivalent material properties of reinforced composites by a novel smoothed rebar element technique

Abstract

Reinforced composite materials are widely used in industry and also have attracted the interest in academia due to their superior properties. The numerical methods are usually employed for evaluating the microscopic mechanical properties of composite materials. In this paper, an efficient numerical approach is developed by coupling the strain smoothing technique and the rebar element technique base on the framework of traditional finite element method. The proposed approach can be applied with the simple meshes, and it requires few degrees of freedom compared to the traditional finite element method, thus the computational time and storage requirement are significantly reduced. In addition, the quality of solutions with the distorted meshes can also be assured, and the coordinate mapping and the calculation of Jacobian matrix can be eliminated. On the other hand, the local strain/stress is captured by reanalysis with substructure technique. The superior performances of the proposed approach are numerically demonstrated with several numerical examples compared with the traditional finite element method, especially the distorted meshes can also yield reasonable results. Finally, the proposed approach is employed for the evaluation of the equivalent elastic properties of polymeric nano-composites material, which reaffirms that the present approach has good performance.