The effective elastic properties of chain-like structural particle-reinforced composites

Abstract

In recent years, as a series of chain-structured particle-reinforced composites (CSPRC), magnetorheological elastomers (MREs) can be one of the main components of absorbers, actuators and sensors, and have great application prospect in construction, vibration control and automobile industry and other fields. The particles in these composites usually form a chain-like anisotropic distribution, which takes into account certain periodicity and randomness. This feature brings a bit of a challenge in the effective prediction of their elastic behavior, especially the more intuitive prediction. A three-dimensional double inclusion model has been proposed in this paper, based on the generalized Mori-Tanaka theory, to study the effective elastic properties of these composites. Through the introduction of an effective medium into the representative volume element, the elastic interaction in the different directions of the composites has been simplified to be equivalent to the elastic interaction among particles in three orthogonal directions. An analytical expression that can be used to estimate the effective properties of these composite materials has been formulated. The model can not only be used to predict the anisotropic modulus and the Poisson's ratio of these composites, but also to predict the effective elastic properties of composites with isotropic particle distribution. Numerical results indicate some internal relationship between the elastic modulus composite materials and the elastic properties of matrix and particles, and simulation results were in good agreement with the experimental data.