A MICROMECHANICAL ANALYSIS OF THE ELASTIC BEHAVIOR OF ALIGNED SHORT-FIBER-REINFORCED COMPOSITES

This paper presents a cell-stress approach for predicting the elastic and thermal behavior of aligned short-fiber reinforced composites, which is based on modeling a composite lamina with a regular array of material cells, constructing a possible stress pattern for a representative cell and then minimizing the complementary energy of the representative cell under given average stresses. The procedure is concise in concept, theoretically adaptable and easy to conduct. Typical features of the stress state in a material cell of the composite are exhibited. The concerned overall properties of the composite are studied numerically in relation to its geometrical parameters of construction.