Prediction of effective mechanical properties of composite materials using homogenization approach: Application to tungsten fiber reinforced bulk metallic glass matrix composite

Abstract

In this paper, the homogenization approach was presented to predict the effective mechanical properties of heterogeneous materials such as composite materials. Indeed, the main idea of this approach is to characterize the effective mechanical properties from a microstructural description of the heterogeneous materials and the knowledge of the local behavior of constituents using the homogenization process. It is a very efficient tool which is intensively developed in the field of numerical simulation of heterogeneous materials. Different scheme established from the solution of Eshelby’s inclusion problem are recalled such as Mori-Tanaka scheme, dilute scheme and Voigt and Reuss bounds. Homogenization approach was applied to estimate the effective mechanical properties of tungsten fiber reinforced bulk metallic glass matrix composite. Predicted values were confronted with those obtained by experimental approach from literature. These comparisons show good agreement between the predicted and experimental values. The maximum deviations remain lower than 10.5% using Voigt bound. A parametric study shows that the mechanical properties depend strongly on the shape of inclusions.