INTERPENETRATING PHASE COMPOSITES: MICROMECHANICAL ANALYSIS OF DAMAGE BEHAVIOR

摘要

Numerical investigations of the mechanical behavior and strength of interpenetrating phase composites are presented in this work. A series of micromechanical models of IPCs is developed, using the voxel array based code for 3D FE model generation. The deformation and damage evolution in composites with interpenetrating isotropic (3D random chessboard) and graded microstructures are numerically simulated. The tensile stress-strain curves, fraction of failed elements, and stress, strain and damage distributions at different stages of loading are determined for different random microstructures of the composites. It was shown that the stiffness, peak and yield stresses of a graded composite decrease with increasing the sharpness of the transition zone between the region of high volume content of the hard phase and the reinforcement free region.