Novel numerical implementation of asymptotic homogenization method for periodic plate structures

The present paper develops and implements finite element formulation for the asymptotic homogenization theory for periodic composite plate and shell structures, earlier developed in Kalamkarov (1987) and Kalamkarov (1992), and thus adopts this analytical method for the analysis of periodic inhomogeneous plates and shells with more complicated periodic microstructures. It provides a benchmark test platform for evaluating various methods such as representative volume approaches to calculate effective properties. Furthermore, the new numerical implementation (Cheng et al., 2013) of asymptotic homogenization method of 2D and 3D materials with periodic microstructure is shown to be directly applicable to predict effective properties of periodic plates without any complicated mathematical derivation. The new numerical implementation is based on the rigorous mathematical foundation of the asymptotic homogenization method, and also simplicity similar to the representative volume method. It can be applied easily using commercial software as a black box. Different kinds of elements and modeling techniques available in commercial software can be used to discretize the unit cell. Several numerical examples are given to demonstrate the validity of the proposed methods. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.