Background & Technical Barriers

Composites have the potential to meet the demanding requirements of high performance, light weight, high controllability, and high reliability imposed on modern and future engineering systems.

However, composites are inherently heterogeneous, anisotropic, and multiscale. These challenging features make obsolete the traditional analysis method used for designing homogeneous isotropic structures and materials. Moreover, composite materials and structures are usually designed to operate in multiple fields such as thermal, hygroscopic, electric and magnetic fields in addition to the traditional mechanical field. That is, a multiphysics approach is needed for composites. Existing models are mainly based on various a priori assumptions, resulting in models either too simple (e.g. the Classical Lamination Theory) or too complex (e.g. higher-order layerwise theories). What is worse is that predictability of these models is not guaranteed because the starting a priori assumptions might not be valid for some cases. 

Our Solution

To seek better analysis tools for com-posites, we developed a new approach, namely the efficient high-fidelity modeling, for composites based on the  variational asymptotic method of  Prof. Berdichevsky with no a priori assumptions. These models have been implemented into VABS, VAPAS, and VAMUCH for structural modeling and micromechanics modeling . The advant-ages of our tools are their generality, accuracy, and efficiency. Specifically, our approach has achieved the best compromise between efficiency and accuracy for multiphysics alysis of composite materials and structures.