Prediction of Elastic Properties of Glass Fiber Reinforced Epoxy Composites by Micromechanical Analysis

Recently, fiber reinforced polymer composites have a wide range of applications as a class of structural materials because of their advantages such as ease of fabrication, relatively low cost of production & superior strength as compared to neat polymer resins. The representative volume element (RVE) plays a central role in the mechanics and physics to calculate the effective properties of heterogeneous materials. The aim of the present work is to determine the elastic properties of glass fiber reinforced epoxy composite by varying the volume fraction of fiber. The properties of the composite are determined by finite element analysis (FEA) of the RVE with necessary boundary conditions using ANSYS. In order to validate the FEA model, the numerical results of elastic properties are compared with the analytical methods. It has been observed that elastic properties predicted by the finite element analysis agree well with the existing analytical predictions.