Mechanical Modeling of Reinforced Materials as Multiphase Systems

The concept of a multiphase model of heterogeneous media, such as reinforced materials, originates from the basic intuition that the macroscopic behavior of this kind of materials can be appropriately described as the superposition of several (and not only one as in the classical homogenization procedure) continua, called phases . It is therefore strongly reminiscent of that classically developed in the field of poromechanics where a fluid saturated porous solid (soil or rock) is modeled by two such mutually interacting fluid and solid phases. It should be noted that, in closer connection to our topic, this concept had been already advocated by Stern and Bedford and Bedford and Drumheller for modeling the dynamic behavior of elastic laminates.