A stepping scheme for predicting effective properties of the multi-inclusion composites

A stepping scheme is developed in the present paper to predict the effective properties of composites with high inclusion volume fraction and/or several kinds of inclusions. In this method the inclusions are treated step by step and the effective stiffness coefficients are calculated for the resulting composite in each step. The numerical results of the effective properties of multi-inclusion composites indicate that materials with a high volume fraction of inclusions or multiple inclusions can be dealt with precisely by the stepping scheme. For the case of a binary composite consisting of a matrix and one kind of inclusion, the present results agree