Effective yield limits of microstructured materials

In a recent article, a closed-form expression of the effective yield limit under uniaxial loading has been given for elastoplastic laminates made of isotropic layers. It was suspected that this result may serve as a reference solution for more complex microstructures by subjecting it to orientation averaging. It turns out that this is possible, but not by interface orientation averaging. The yield limit is more affected by the long range order of the microstructure than by local interface orientations. Consequently, reasonable estimates may be obtained by identifying planes of easy shear band formation, and using these for orientation averaging. This is demonstrated by determining the yield limit of two different microstructures numerically, both with cubic symmetry but different interface orientation distributions.