Open Access

ARTICLE

A New Fast Multipole Boundary Element Method for Large Scale Analysis of Mechanical Properties in 3D Particle-Reinforced Composites

Haitao Wang¹, Zhenhan Yao¹

1 Dept. Engineering Mechanics, TsinghuaUniv., Beijing, China

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2005, 7(1), 85-96. https://doi.org/10.3970/cmes.2005.007.085

Abstract

This paper addresses a new boundary element method (BEM) for the numerical analysis of mechanical properties in 3D particle-reinforced composites. The BEM is accelerated by a new version fast multipole method (FMM) in order to perform large scale simulation of a representative volume element (RVE) containing up to several hundred randomly distributed elastic spherical particles on only one personal computer. The maximum number of degrees of freedom (DOF) reaches more than 300,000. Efficiency of the developed new version fast multipole BEM code is evaluated compared with other conventional solutions for BEM. The effects of micro-structural parameters, namely the particle size, particle/matrix moduli ratio and particle volume fraction on the effective elastic moduli and interfacial stress fields are studied. The numerical results show that fast multipole BEM is a promising tool for large scale analysis of overall mechanical properties and micro-structural details in such kind of composites, when the particles and matrix are assumed to be elastic. Based on the present work, future investigations could be extended to simulation on brittle fracture process.

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Keywords

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