Multiscale FE2 elastoviscoplastic analysis of composite structures

This paper discusses modelling of the behaviour of structures reinforced by long fibre SiC/Ti composite material with a periodic microstructure. A new multiscale behaviour model based on a multilevel finite element (FE2) approach is used to take into account heterogeneities in the behaviour between the fibre and matrix. It is shown that combining this model with parallel computation techniques now makes it possible to consider realistic composite structural computations yielding a detailed geometric description and constitutive equations giving access to microstructural data, instead of only to phenomenological macroscopic data difficult to correlate with the local mechanical state. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.