Optimal design and non-linear computation of mechanical behavior of sphere reinforced composites

This paper presents an efficient method to automatically generate and mesh random non-periodic three dimensional (3D) microstructures for three classes of complex heterogeneous media having a wide range of important engineering applications, porous media, composites with interfacial debonding and composites with high density parades. The resulting 3D microstructure is intentionally constructed to be easily and efficiently implemented in standard finite element computational codes. Several examples of 3D representative volume elements are shown. The performance of the proposal in finite element analysis is demonstrated in numerical implementation to predict the effective non-linear elastic-plastic response of two-phase particulate composites reinforced with spherical particles. The main result achieved is the estimation of the effective plastic tangent modulus by a simple linear regression equation for different volume fractions. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.