Computational homogenization of syntactic foams & material response subjected to extreme loads

Owing to the important role of Syntactic Foam composite materials in various industrial applications, having applicable information about its mechanical (constitutive) properties are of high level of efficiency for analysis and design purposes. This work aims at deriving the bounds of the overall properties of a specific type of syntactic foam-hollow sphere glass-polymer resin- composite material. Focusing on the overall mechanical parameters of the composite material, such as; the Young modulus and the Poisson’s ratio, the investigation is centered on a computational homogenization scheme over a vast range of Representative Volume Elements (RVE) types. Several computational models of RVEs are created using a commercial code finite element analysis code, to investigate the effects of independent material manufacturing parameters, such as; inclusion particles-hollow sphere glass- membrane thickness, volume fraction and size and distribution patterns. The computational modeling procedure is arranged with a hierarchical trend, starting from simple ones, in order to assure results reliability. Furthermore, experimental results and analytic tools-MATLAB code for Voigt-Reuss bounds- are used as benchmarks to validate and compare the derived results.