TFA-based Homogenization for Composites Subjected to Coupled Damage-friction Effects

The increasing use of composite materials in several fields of structural engineering has motivated the development of mathematical homogenization techniques, which allow to derive the overall homogenized material properties and to determine homogenized equivalent material. In particular, it is of great interest the case of composite whose constituents present nonlinear response due to inelastic effects such as plasticity, viscosity or damage. To this end, classical homogenization techniques [10], or advanced approaches [11,12,16] have been developed. The Transformation Field Analysis (TFA) can be considered an interesting and effective homogenization technique for solving the nonlinear micro-mechanical homogenization problem [4–7,9,15]. Particular interest arise in the evaluation of the macroscopic constitutive response of heterogeneous materials when its constituents are characterized by damaging phenomena and when decohesion between the constituents occurs [1,8,13]. Aim of the present study is the development of a homogenization technique for composite materials able to derive the overall mechanical response of the composite taking into account possible decohesion processes between constituents, as illustrated in figure 1 .