Numerical evaluation on mechanical properties of short-fiber-reinforced metal matrix composites: Two-step mean-field homogenization procedure

In this paper, the two-step mean-field homogenization procedures including the Mori-Tanaka (M-T) and interpolative double inclusion (D-I) models in the first-step homogenization procedure and the Voigt and Reuss models in the second-step homogenization procedure, are introduced and implemented to predict the effective elastic properties of short-fiber-reinforced metal matrix composites. To take into account the effect of fiber orientation, the detailed implementation of the fiber orientation transformation and fiber orientation averaging procedure is described. Compared with the effective elastic properties of short-fiber-reinforced metal matrix composites predicted by the RVE based FE homogenization method and measured from the uniaxial tensile experiments, the two-step mean-field homogenization procedures: D-I/Reuss, M-T/Reuss, D-I/Voigt and M-T/Voigt would provide the acceptable predictions on the effective elastic properties of short-fiber-reinforced metal matrix composites, and the D-I/Reuss and M-T/Voigt two-step mean-field homogenization procedures provide more tight bounds (D-I/Reuss as the lower bound and M-T/Vogit as the upper bound). For more accurate estimate of the effective elastic properties of short-fiber-reinforced metal matrix composites, a modified two-step mean-field homogenization procedure is proposed and validated.