On the stiffness of composites with large amounts of rigid phase embedded in a ductile matrix

Abstract

A calculation is presented, of the self-consistent genre, to predict the effective isotropic stiffness of a two-phase mixture. The model is valid for high concentrations of rigid equiaxed grains embedded in a power law hardening matrix. A simple formula is derived for the stiffness of such composites as a function of the matrix strain hardening exponent and the concentration. This estimate for the stiffness complements the dilute solution models that exist in the literature.