Definition of Effective Material Properties of Recycled Plastic: Image Analysis and Homogenization

The influence of foaming agent on the properties of steel-reinforced beams made of recycled plastic material is studied in the paper. The foaming agent creates a porous core in the recycled plastic elements. This core must be reflected when deriving the beam effective properties to be used in macroscopic simulations. To that end, standard image analysis combined with nanoindentation and the Mori-Tanaka micromechanical model is adopted to identify elastic material properties of the plastic material both inside and outside of the core. These are expected to enter an independent macroscopic analysis of the steel-reinforced beams.