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Rapid Generation of Representative Volume Elements with Non-uniformly Dispersed Reinforcements for High Volume Fraction Composites

JOHN MONTESANO, GENG LI, FARZAD SHARIFPOUR, ARAM BAHMANI

Abstract


With the increased usage of lightweight composite materials for various applications across different industrial sectors, so-called computational experiments are becoming more widely employed to tailor and optimize their properties and minimize experimental testing during design. A representative volume element (RVE) depicting the material’s microstructure is often used to evaluate effective macroscopic properties or assess local stress concentrations for damage initiation prediction. Past research efforts have generated RVEs for composites with multiple realistic nonuniformly dispersed reinforcement geometries to improve mechanical property prediction accuracy. The challenge is that existing algorithms often require a great deal of time to converge to a suitable microstructural representation when many nonuniformly dispersed reinforcements are considered, or they may not converge at all for composites with high reinforcement volume fractions. In this study a new efficient method for rapidly generating realistic RVEs for various types of composite materials containing reinforcement volume fractions up to 80% was developed based on event driven molecular dynamics (EDMD) theory. A thorough spatial statistical assessment, including use of radial distribution functions and 3D autocorrelation with density recovery profiles, was performed on the generated RVE geometries to gauge the degree of non-uniformity of the reinforcement dispersion.


DOI
10.12783/asc33/26167

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