Material behavior of short-fiber composites can be found from the fiber orientation distribution function, with the only widely accepted procedure derived from the application of orientation/moment tensors. The use of orientation tensors requires a closure, whereby the higher order tensor is approximated as a function of the lower order tensor thereby introducing additional computational errors. We present material property expectation values computed directly from the fiber orientation distribution function, thereby alleviating the closure problem inherent to orientation tensors. Material properties are computed from statistically independent unidirectional fiber samples taken from the fiber orientation distribution function. The statistical nature of the distribution function is evaluated with Monte-Carlo simulations to obtain approximate stiffness tensors from the underlying unidirectional composite properties. Examples are presented for simple analytical distributions to demonstrate the effectiveness of expectation values and results are compared to properties obtained through orientation tensors. Results yield a value less than 1.5% for the coefficient of variation and suggest that the orientation tensor method for computing material properties is applicable only for the case of non-interacting fibers.
Learning to Estimate the Fiber Orientation Distribution Function from Diffusion-Weighted MRI
