The Determination of Stress Distribution and Elastic Properties for Heterogeneous Materials with Hybrid Finite Element

This paper describes a numerical method for evaluating the micro and macromechanical response of two-dimensional heterogeneous materials with both periodic and random distribution of the second phase. The proposed method uses two different numerical programs, based on the Voronoi Cell Finite Element Method, developed by the authors. Various numerical examples are executed for validating the effectiveness of the proposed method in evaluating the overall elastic constants of heterogeneous materials, and different comparison with analytical models and experimental results are shown. In order to validate the accuracy of the programs for predicting the stress micro-fields around the inclusion, some comparisons with a FEM commercial numerical code are performed.