Date of Award:

5-2013

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Committee Chair(s)

Wenbin Yu

Committee

Wenbin Yu

Committee

Thomas H. Fronk

Committee

Steven L. Folkman

Committee

Ling Liu

Committee

Zhaohu Nie

Abstract

To seek better material behaviors, the research of material properties has been massively carried out in both industrial and academic fields throughout the twentieth century. Composite materials are known for their abilities of combining constituent materials in or- der to fulfill the desirable overall material performance. One of the advantages of composite materials is the adjustment between stiffness and lightness of materials in order to meet the needs of various engineering designs. Even though the finite element analysis is mature, composites are heterogeneous in nature and can present difficulties at the structural level with the acceptable computational time. A way of simplifying such problems is to find a way to connect structural analysis with corresponding analysis of representative microstructure of the material, which is normally called micromechanics modeling or homogenization.
Generally speaking, the goal of homogenization is to predict a precise material behavior by taking into account the information stored in both microscopic and macroscopic levels of the composites. Of special concern to researchers and engineers is the thermomechanical behavior of composite materials since thermal effect is almost everywhere in real practical cases of engineering. In aerospace engineering, the thermomechanical behaviors of composites are even more important since flight under high speed usually produces a large amount of heat which will cause very high thermal-related deformation and stress.
In this dissertation, the thermomechanical behavior of composites will be studied based on the variational asymptotic method for unit cell homogenization (VAMUCH) which was recently developed as an efficient and accurate micromechanics modeling tool. The theories and equations within the code are based on the variational asymptotic method invented by Prof. Berdichevsky. For problems involving small parameters, the traditional asymptotic method is often applied by solving a system of differential equations while the variational asymptotic method is using a variational statement that only solves one functional of such problems where the traditional asymptotic method may apply.
First, we relax the assumption made by traditional linear thermoelasticity that not only a small overall strain is assumed to be small but also the temperature variation. Of course, in this case we need to add temperature dependent material properties to VAMUCH so that the secant material properties can be calculated. Then, we consider the temperature field to be point-wise different within the microstructure; a micromechanics model with nonuniformly distributed temperature field will be addressed. Finally, the internal and external loads induced energies are considered in order to handle real engineering structures under their working conditions.

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