Development of two- and three-dimensional bi-material elements

A procedure for developing two- and three-dimensional bi-material elements, which are able to eliminate the weakness of the conventional finite elements in determining the stress distributions along fibre-matrix interfaces, has been proposed. Two- and three-dimensional mulitfibre composite models were employed to illustrate the versatility and potential accuracy of the proposed elements. The results obtained by these bi-material elements are in good agreement with the experimental results and are superior to the conventional finite element results. A comparison is made between the proposed approach of improving the interfacial stress calculations and another approach which employs the least squares fitting method. The comparison shows that the two approaches provide comparable accuracy but the latter is more difficult to implement.