Representative volume elements for discontinuous carbon fibre composites – Part 1: Boundary conditions

In part 1 of this 2 part paper a method is presented for generating RVE analyses of discontinuous fibre planar distributions of random discontinuous carbon fibre bundles, with no limitation to the fibre volume fraction. An embedded element approach is used to simplify mesh generation for the matrix phase. This approach is shown to yield errors of 1% compared with a more conventional unstructured mesh, whilst offering significant reductions in model size. Periodic boundary conditions are adopted, applying Saint-Venant’s principle to provide an approximation of the effective material properties within an inner RVE region, some distance away from the outer boundary of the model. The critical decay length of prescribing such boundary conditions is shown to be approximately two times the fibre length in all cases, when a heterogeneous material (rather than homogeneous material) is used to model the outer region.