Micromechanical and Finite Element Modeling for Composites

Abstract

The major areas of applications of the composite materials today encompass fields as wide as wind energy to marine to construction to aerospace to strategic areas. Apart from such specialized fields the major composite market blooms out of their extensive exploitations in the automotive, sporting goods, pipes, tanks, chemicals, fertilizers and many other industries. As compared to the conventional materials, the composites offer several unique advantages. The list of such advantages may include as a typical example the higher tensile strength, the lighter weight, the greater corrosion resistance, the better surface finish and the easier processability. It is interesting to note that in 2011, the global composite materials market size was $19.6 billion and the same is estimated now to reach approximately $34.1 billion in 2018. This amounts to a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of about 10.5% percent. This huge market growth of composites will require a thorough knowledge of the mechanics and mechanical properties of a wide variety of composites under a still wider variety of application dependent constraints. That is why, just to make an humble beginning in this direction, the basics of the composite materials and it's varieties, are briefly described in this Chapter. In addition, the analytical methods of continuum micromechanics have been touched upon. Keeping in view the complex microstructure of most of the composites, and the effect that such complexities can have in the resultant properties, the numerical approaches to continuum micromechanics has been highlighted with emphasis on the fundamentals of the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) based methods. Further, the concepts involved in modelling of the “Failure of composites” have been elucidated with some interesting case studies.