Open Access

ARTICLE

Homogenization Analysis for Particulate Composite Materials using the Boundary Element Method

Hiroshi Okada¹, Yasuyoshi Fukui¹, Noriyoshi Kumazawa¹

1 Kagoshima University, Kagoshima, Japan

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2004, 5(2), 135-150. https://doi.org/10.3970/cmes.2004.005.135

Abstract

A method to obtain the effective mechanical properties of particulate composite materials is presented in this paper. The methodology is based on the boundary element method (BEM) coupled with analytical solutions for ellipsoidal inclusions such as Eshelby's tensor. There is no numerical integration for the surfaces or the domains of distributed particles, and, therefore, proposed technique is very efficient. Homogenization analysis based on representative volume element (RVE) is carried out considering a unit cell containing many particles (up to 1000). By using a conventional BEM approach (i.e., multi-region BEM), it would be extremely difficult to analyze such a large RVE, since the problem size would become unacceptably large. Some numerical solutions are presented and the accuracy of present approach is discussed in this paper.

---

Keywords

---