Effective elastic moduli of triply periodic particulate matrix composites with imperfect unit cells

In many problems the material may possess a periodic microstructure formed by the spatial repetition of small microstructures, or unit cells. Such a perfectly regular distribution, of course, does not exist in actual cases, although the periodic modeling can be quite useful, since it provides rigorous estimations with a priori prescribed accuracy for various material properties. Triply periodic particulate matrix composites with imperfect unit cells are analyzed in this paper. The multiparticle effective field method (MEFM) is used for the analysis of the perfect and imperfect periodic structure composites. The MEFM is originally based on the homogeneity hypothesis (HI) (see for details [Bury-achenko, V.A., 2001. Multiparticle effective field and related methods in micromechanics of composite materials. Appl. Mech. Rev. 54, 1-47]) of effective field acting on the inclusions. In this way the pair interaction of different inclusions is taken directly into account by the use of analytical approximate solution. For perfect periodic structures the hypothesis (HI) is enough for estimation of effective properties. Imperfection of packing necessitates exploring some additional assumption called a closing hypothesis. The next imperfections are analyzed. (A) The probability of location of an inclusion in the center of a unit cell below one (missing inclusion). (B) Some hard inclusions are randomly replaced by the porous (modeling the complete debonding) with some probability. At first, one obtains general explicit integral representations of the effective elastic moduli and strain concentrator factors depending on three numerical solutions: for the perfect periodic structure, for the infinite periodic structure with one imperfection, and for the infinite periodic structure with two arbitrary located imperfections. The method proposed is general; it is not limited by concrete numerical scheme. No restrictions were assumed on both the concrete microstructure and inhomogeneity of stress fields in the inclusions. The inclusions of one kind are assumed to be aligned. The problem (A) is solved at the level of numerical results obtained in the framework of the hypothesis (H 1). For the problem (B) the numerical results are obtained if the elastic inclusions (for example hard inclusions) are randomly replaced by another inclusion (for example by the voids modeling the complete debonding). The mentioned problems are solved by three methods. The first one is a Monte Carlo simulation exploring an analytical approximate solution for the binary interacting inclusions obtained in the framework of the hypothesis (H1). The second one is a generalization of the version of the MEFM proposed for the analysis of the perfect periodic particulate composites and based on the choice of a comparison medium coinciding with the matrix. The third method uses a decomposition of the desired solution on the solution for the perfect periodic structure and on the perturbation produced by the imperfections in the perfect periodic structure. All three methods lead to close results in the considered examples; however, the CPU times expended for the solution estimation by Monte Carlo simulation differ by a factor of 1000. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.