Micromechanical modeling and computation of elasto-plastic materials reinforced with distributed-orientation fibers

This paper deals with the mean-field homogenization of multiphase elasto-plastic materials reinforced with non-spherical and non-aligned inclusions. Most of the literature on the micro–macro modeling of elasto-plastic composites deals with fixed-orientation fibers but this paper is concerned with cases where the inclusions have a non-uniform orientation defined by an orientation distribution function (ODF). We propose a general two-step incremental formulation and the corresponding numerical algorithms which are able to deal with any rate-independent model for any phase as well as cyclic or otherwise non-proportional loadings. The formulation was implemented in the DIGIMAT (2003) software and the numerical predictions were validated against experimental data for several composite systems.