Comparative analysis of micromechanical models for the elastic composite laminae

This paper deals with the first step required for the analysis and design of composite materials and structures: estimation of the effective macromechanical properties according to the structure of composite, properties of constituent materials and their volume fractions. There exist many micromechanical models proposed in the literature to estimate these effective elastic properties. Each one of these models is based on hypotheses that are valid for certain types of composite structures. The present paper aims to highlight the main assumptions of these models and compare their predictions with a set of 188 experimental data, compiled from 25 references, assuming that just the constituents' properties are available as input. The following nine major micromechanical models are evaluated: asymptotic homogenization with hexagonal unit cell; asymptotic homogenization with square unit cell; Bridging; Chamis; generalized self-consistent; Halpin-Tsai; modified Halpin-Tsai; Mori-Tanaka; and rule of mixture (ROM). Besides, a novel modified version of the rule of mixture allowing better agreement with the experimental data is also proposed. It is shown, in particular, that the newly proposed modified rule of mixture model provides the best correlation with the experimental data among the ROM-based models, while the asymptotic homogenization presents the best predictions among the elasticity-based models.