Elastic and inelastic local strain fields in composites with coated fibers or particles: theory and validation

This paper deals with mean field multiscale approaches for coated fiber- or particle-reinforced composites under nonlinear strain. The current work attempts to extend Dvorak’s well-known transformation field analysis for mean field approaches, in which the composite’s constitutive law is split into an elastic and an inelastic part. The classical Eshelby’s inhomogeneity problem considering eigenstrains is revisited in order to address the presence of a coating layer. For this scope, three different methodologies are employed, one for general ellipsoidal inhomogeneities, a modified composite cylinder method for long cylindrical fibers and a modified composite sphere method for spherical particles. After identifying proper interaction tensors for the inhomogeneity and its coating layer, the composite’s overall response is evaluated by extending classical mean field techniques, such as the Mori–Tanaka and the self-consistent methods. Numerical examples illustrate the differences in macroscopic and microscopic predictions between the general approach and the modified composite cylinder and sphere Assemblages.

Effective potentials in nonlinear polycrystals and quadrature formulae

This study presents a family of estimates for effective potentials in nonlinear polycrystals. Noting that these potentials are given as averages, several quadrature formulae are investigated to express these integrals of nonlinear functions of local fields in terms of the moments of these fields. Two of these quadrature formulae reduce to known schemes, including a recent proposition (Ponte Castañeda 2015 Proc. R. Soc. A 471 , 20150665 ( doi:10.1098/rspa.2015.0665 )) obtained by completely different means. Other formulae are also reviewed that make use of statistical information on the fields beyond their first and second moments. These quadrature formulae are applied to the estimation of effective potentials in polycrystals governed by two potentials, by means of a reduced-order model proposed by the authors (non-uniform transformation field analysis). It is shown how the quadrature formulae improve on the tangent second-order approximation in porous crystals at high stress triaxiality. It is found that, in order to retrieve a satisfactory accuracy for highly nonlinear porous crystals under high stress triaxiality, a quadrature formula of higher order is required.