Micromechanical modeling and computation of elasto-plastic materials reinforced with distributed-orientation fibers

This paper deals with the mean-field homogenization of multiphase elasto-plastic materials reinforced with non-spherical and non-aligned inclusions. Most of the literature on the micro-macro modeling of elasto-plastic composites deals with fixed-orientation fibers but this paper is concerned with cases where the inclusions have a non-uniform orientation defined by an orientation distribution function (ODF). We propose a general two-step incremental formulation and the corresponding numerical algorithms which are able to deal with any rate-independent model for any phase as well as cyclic or otherwise non-proportional loadings. The formulation was implemented in the DIGIMAT (2003) software and the numerical predictions were validated against experimental data for several composite systems. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.