Muti-scale methods with strain-softening: damage-enhanced MFH for composite materials and computational homogenization for cellular materials with micro-buckling

In this work, multi-scale methods with strain softening are developed in the contexts of damage modeling for composite laminates and of buckling analyses in cellular materials.

First, an anisotropic gradient–enhanced continuum damage model is embedded in a mean–field homogenization (MFH) process for elasto-plastic composites. The homogenization procedure is based on the newly developed incremental secant mean-field homogenization formulation, for which the residual stress and strain states reached in the phases upon a fictitious elastic unloading are considered as starting point to apply the secant method. The mean stress fields in the phases are then computed using isotropic secant tensors, which are naturally used to define the Linear Comparison–Composite The resulting multi– scale model is then applied to study the damage process at the meso–scale of laminates, and in particular the damaging of plies in a composite stack. By using the gradient–enhanced continuum damage model, the problem of losing uniqueness upon strain softening is avoided.

Second, an efficient multi–scale finite element framework capturing the buckling instabilities in cellular materials is developed. As a classical multi–scale computational homogenization scheme loses accuracy with the apparition of the macroscopic localizations resulting from the micro–buckling, the second order multi–scale computational homogenization scheme is considered. This second–order computational framework is enhanced with the following novelties so that it can be used for cellular materials. At the microscopic scale, the periodic boundary condition is used because of its efficiency. As the meshes generated from cellular materials exhibit a large void part on the boundaries and are not conforming in general, the classical enforcement based on the matching nodes cannot be applied. A new method based on the polynomial interpolation2 without the requirement of the matching mesh condition on opposite boundaries of the representative volume element (RVE) is developed. Next, in order to solve the underlying macroscopic Mindlin strain gradient continuum of this second–order scheme by the displacement–based finite element framework, the treatment of high order terms is based on the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method to weakly impose the C1-continuity. Finally, as the instability phenomena are considered at both scales of the cellular materials, the path following technique is adopted to solve both the macroscopic and microscopic problems.