Peridynamic modelling of periodic microstructured materials

With the enhancement in additive manufacturing technology, microstructured materials has attracted significant attention during the last few years. Although these materials can show homogenised properties at the macroscopic scale, their microstructural properties can be very influential on the overall material behaviour especially on the fracture strength of the material since defects such as microcracks and voids can exist. Analysing each and every detail of the microstructure can be computationally expensive. Therefore, homogenisation approaches are widely used especially for periodic microstructured materials including composites. However, some of the existing homogenisation approaches can have limitations if defects exist since displacements become discontinuous if cracks occur in the structure which requires extra attention. As an alternative approach, peridynamics can be utilised since peridynamic equations are based on integro-differential equations and do not contain any spatial derivatives. Hence, in this study peridynamic modelling of periodic microstructured will be presented and the capability of the approach will be demonstrated with several numerical examples with and without defects. (C) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.