Chapter 2: Material Characterization in Material Designer

Modeling short fiber reinforced composite materials is particularly challenging because of their anisotropic, orientation dependent, and nonlinear behavior. To address this challenge, Material Designer combines micro-mechanical with phenomenological methods. Specifically, linear elastic and thermal material properties of the composite are obtained by homogenization using well established micro-mechanical methods. Instead, the plastic deformation behavior – yielding and hardening – is predicted by a phenomenological model calibrated against experimental data.