Characterization of composite material properties using eigenstrain method

Abstract

A technique to solve the periodic homogenization problem is described systematically in this work. The method is to solve the cell problems by imposing eigenstrains in terms of thermal or piezoelectric strain to the representative volume element. Homogenized coefficients are then calculated from stress solutions of those cell problems. Benefit of the proposed technique is that it is readily applicable for common finite element softwares regardless of using user subroutines. Several numerical examples are examined. The obtained results show good agreements with the published data.