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Updated: Jun 5, 2025

Cutting Procedures, Tensile Testing, and Ageing of Flexible Unidirectional Composite Laminates
Published on: April 27, 2019
A maximum-entropy length-orientation closure for short-fiber reinforced composites
Alok Mehta1, Matti Schneider1,2
1Institute of Engineering Mathematics, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany.
Abstract:
We describe an algorithm for generating fiber-filled volume elements for use in computational homogenization schemes which accounts for a coupling of the fiber-length and the fiber-orientation. For prescribed fiber-length distribution and fiber-orientation tensor of second order, a maximum-entropy estimate is used to produce a fiber-length-orientation distribution which mimics real injection molded specimens, where longer fibers show a stronger alignment than shorter fibers. We derive the length-orientation closure from scratch, discuss its integration into the sequential addition and migration algorithm for generating fiber-filled microstructures for industrial volume fractions and investigate the resulting effective elastic properties. We demonstrate that accounting for the length-orientation coupling permits to match the measured Young's moduli in principal fiber direction and transverse to it more accurately than for closure approximations ignoring the length-orientation coupling.
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