Brittle-ductile transition in fiber-reinforced composites

Fiber-reinforced composites are a class of material with increasing industrial applications. Computer simulations have been used in order to understand the microscopic mechanism which can explain their mechanical behavior and several models have been introduced in the last decade. In this paper we introduce a criterion to define the brittle-ductile transition region in unidirectional fiber-reinforced composites. In order to simulate a fiber bundle, a recently introduced stochastic model is used. The results obtained with our criterion are compared with those obtained by using a self-organized criticality (SOC) approach.