EVALUATION OF EFFECTIVE THERMOELASTIC PROPERTIES OF PERIODIC COMPOSITES USING A THREE-DIMENSIONAL FINITE-VOLUME MODEL

Resumo

The prediction of the effective thermomechanical behavior of composite materials has been
a matter of great interest over the last decades. This is justified because in many important industrial
applications such materials are subjected simultaneously to high thermal gradients and mechanical
loading. The level and distribution of the stress and strain produced by these actions are strongly
dependent on the microstructural details of the composite. This work presents a theoretical study on
the evaluation of the effective thermoelastic properties of composites with periodic microstructures.
The focused effective properties are the elastic moduli and thermal expansion coefficients. For this
end, it is applied a three-dimensional micromechanical model based on the parametric finite-volume
formulation. In the employed three-dimensional model, the repeating unit cell of the composite is
discretized into hexahedral subvolumes to capture the in situ microstructural details. The effective
thermal expansion coefficients are evaluated using the well-known Levin’s formula. To demonstrate
the efficiency of the homogenization model, numerical examples of periodic composites reinforced by

short and long aligned fibers are presented and their results are compared with analytical and finite-
element solutions.