Fiber-reinforced materials
Fiber-reinforced materials are employed and investigated in several fields, e.g., automotive, aeronautical, aerospace, civil engineering, and biomechanics, thanks to their mechanical properties. The fibers possess, in fact, features that offer a significant increase in structural efficiency.
The aim of this activity is to propose a numerical framework for the analysis of problems involving fiber-reinforced anisotropic materials.
Specifically, isotropic linear elastic solids, reinforced by inextensible fibers, are studied. To avoid locking-phenomena in the numerical solution due to the presence of the kinematic constraint of inextensibility, mixed finite elements are proposed. Several boundary-value problems are solved and numerical results are compared to analytical solutions, whenever the derivation is possible.
Key publications:
F. Auricchio, G. Scalet, P. Wriggers. Fiber-reinforced materials: finite elements for the treatment of the inextensibility constraint, Computational Mechanics, 1-18, 2017. (pre-print version) (doi)