Homogenization for composite material properties using smoothed finite element method

Abstract

Numerical homogenization is an efficient way to determine effective material properties of composite materials. Conventionally, the finite element technique has been widely used in implementing the homogenization. However, the standard finite element method (FEM) leads to an overly-stiff model which gives poor accuracy especially using triangular elements in 2D or tetrahedral elements in 3D with coarse mesh. In this paper, the smoothed finite element methods (S-FEMs) are developed to analyse the effective mechanical properties of composite materials. Various examples, including modulus with multiphase composites and permeability of tissue scaffold, have demonstrated that smoothed finite element method is able to provide more accurate results using the same set of mesh compared with the standard finite element method. In addition, the computation efficiency of smoothed finite element method is also much better than the FEM counterpart