Micro-macro Unified Analysis of Flow Behavior of Particle-reinforced Metal Matrix Composites

This article presents a micro-macro unified model for predicting the deformation of metal matrix composites (MMCs). A macro-scale model is developed to obtain the proper boundary conditions for the micro-scale model, which is used to assess the microstructural deformation of materials. The usage of the submodel technique in the analysis makes it possible to shed light on the stress and strain field at the microlevel. This is helpful to investigate the linkage between the microscopic and the macroscopic flow behavior of the composites. An iterative procedure is also proposed to find out the optimum parameters. The results show that the convergence can be attained after three iterations in computation. In order to demonstrate the reliability of micro-macro unified model, results based on the continuum composite model are also investigated using the stress-strain relation of composite obtained from the iterations. By comparing the proposed unified model to the continuum composite model, it is clear that the former exhibits large plastic deformation in the case of little macroscopic deformation, and the stresses and strains obtained from the submodel are higher than those from the macroscopic deformation.