Composite materials offer potential avenues for tailoring materials with desired properties intended to innovative applications. To speed up this scheme, trial and error practice is evolving to a more rational and organized material design process. This trend depends on our ability to bridge the micro-scale to the system level. An important brick of this process is constituted of micromechanical models that bridge the gap between micro and macro scales in materials. Unfortunately, to forecast the behavior of complex composite materials microstructures, these models remain rudimentary, particularly for the nonlinear regime. Accordingly, our ambition is to highlight the limitations of existing micromechanical models and examine their respective capabilities to predict elastoplastic behavior of composite materials. The assessment reveals that in order to reduce the disparity between micromechanical models predictions and corresponding numerical or experimental results, new robust and efficient micromechanical models are needed. These models have to accurately describe different interactions in the composite and deal with multiphase and two-phase composites with high volume fractions under different loading paths.
A Comparative Study of Crack/Crack Interaction in Composite Materials Using Macro and Micromechanical Models
