Hill-Mandel condition and bounds on lower symmetry elastic crystals

Despite advances in contemporary micromechanics, there is a void in the literature on a versatile method for estimating the effective properties of polycrystals comprising of highly anisotropic single crystals belonging to lower symmetry class. Basing on variational principles in elasticity and the Hill-Mandel homogenization condition, we propose a versatile methodology to fill this void. It is demonstrated that the bounds obtained using the Hill-Mandel condition are tighter than the Voigt and Reuss [1,2] bounds, the Hashin-Shtrikman [3] bounds as well as a recently proposed self-consistent estimate by Kube and Arguelles [4] even for polycrystals with highly anisotropic single crystals. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.