Sensitivity studies for the effective characteristics of periodic multicomponent composites

The main goal is to present the application of design sensitivity analysis in homogenization of periodic multicomponent composites. The effective modulus approach is used to determine homogenized characteristics of the composite together with some upper and lower bounds estimators for these quantities. The approach related to homogenization problem is presented in a general form for a linear elastic n-component periodic composite and is implemented in the finite element method homogenization-oriented computer program MCCEFF. Sensitivity coefficients are determined numerically for various components of homogenized elasticity tensor and, using symbolic analysis, for their bounds, in both cases with respect to material parameters of the components. Structural response functional for such a composite is proposed as the strain energy in various strain states of the composite cell to detect the most influential parameters of the most popular fiber-reinforced structures as well as in the case of multicomponent superconducting composite device.