Toward realization of computational homogenization in practice

We present a computational homogenization approach for linear and non-linear solid mechanics problems, which is fully compatible with conventional finite element code architecture. A seamless implementation in ABAQUS is presented including Python script, validation problems and a web-link where script files, user-defined subroutines and input files can be accessed. For linear problems, we demonstrate how to utilize ABAQUS existing facilities to develop analysis attributes required for solving a unit-cell problem. For non-linear problems, a Python script invoked by a coarse-scale stress update procedure is introduced to carry out the scale bridging. The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) to motivate practitioners to adopt the computational homogenization as an integral part of their analysis and design process; and (ii) to encourage commercial code vendors to seamlessly integrate the architectures proposed in their legacy codes. Copyright q 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd