Elastic parameters of nanoclay-reinforced polymers for space and launch vehicles

The present study derives an analytical expression for the effective elastic modulus of nanoclay-reinforced polymer matrix. The motivation behind the current work is that the usual rule of mixture calculations provides very poor estimates of the elastic parameters of the composite. A micromechanics based model and effective elastic continuum theory are used to derive the effective moduli of an elastic medium embedded with rectilinear inclusions representing disk like nanoclay particles. For simplicity a spatially distributed parallel array of nanoclay dispersion is considered in the current analysis. The effective modulus of the composite is derived in terms of the volume fraction of the nanoclays and the elastic parameters of the virgin matrix and the nanoclay particles.