Geometry modelling and elastic property prediction for short fibre composites

Abstract Short fibre composites and other discontinuous fibre–reinforced material types such as long fibre–reinforced thermoplastics or sheet molding compounds feature a stochastic, disordered microstructure where the fibre orientation distribution might be either completely random or feature (e.g., process-dependent) preference orientations. The microstructural geometry and topology are typically characterized either in terms of the probability distributions for fibre density, length, and orientation, or in terms of second or fourth-order fibre orientation tensors. The present chapter is devoted to methods for determining the respective statistical information on the microstructure from computed tomography, the stochastic characterization of the microstructure in terms of probability distributions, and the fibre orientation tensors derived thereon, as well as the subsequent determination of the effective elastic properties for random short fibre composites using ensemble averaging techniques based on single-fibre methods such as Halpin–Tsai, Mori–Tanaka, or similar methods, introduced in detail in the previous chapters.