Numerical Study of Mechanical Behaviour of Heterogeneous Materials

The mechanical behaviour of heterogeneous specimens under uniaxial tensile test is studied using finite element analysis. The difference between mechanical properties of adjacent regions in the heterogeneous specimen creates constraints which alter the strain path relatively to pure tension. A methodology for determining the local stress-strain curves is proposed and successfully tested numerically on the heterogeneous specimen composed by two materials with dissimilar plastic properties. This methodology has recourse to the same type of variables which are usually obtained experimentally with the digital image correlation technique.