An effective microscale approach for determining the anisotropy of polymer composites reinforced with randomly distributed short fibers

Abstract In this paper, an effective microscopic modeling scheme is presented to analyze mechanical properties of composites with random short fibers. To this end, the displacement-load tests of the standard samples, which are acquired by cutting a short fiber-reinforced composite plate of 650 mm × 650 mm × 2.5 mm, are firstly executed under the quasi-static tensile loads. To identify the geometric sizes of the short fibers and their distributions at microscopic scale, the advanced micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) is employed by testing a small sample of 1 cm × 2.5 mm × 2.5 mm. On this basis, a simplified microscopic model is reconstructed by the 3D parametric finite-volume direct averaging micromechanics (FVDAM) theory according to the statistic results of the micro-CT images. The proposed method is further validated by comparing the effective modulus obtained from tensile tests. The scanning electron microscopy (SEM) is also used to visualize the fracture morphology of the fibers. It is found that brittle fracture occurs in the short-fibers paralleled to the external loading.