Orientation Averaging for Stiffness and Thermal Expansion of Short Fiber Composites

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It is fairly common in practice that during injection moulding, the mold filling process results in non‐uniform fiber orientation distributions in the final injection molded short fiber reinforced composite part. It would be very attractive to employ an orientation averaging scheme to form predictions for the design of short fiber reinforced composite parts. Here, the authors use a finite‐element‐based numerical procedure developed by themselves and, for the first time, directly predict the stiffness and thermal expansion of several hundred multi‐fiber computer models with a variety of different predefined fiber orientation states.