Mechanical behavior of anisotropic composite materials as micropolar continua

The macroscopic behavior of materials with anisotropic microstructure described as micropolar continua is investigated in the present work. Micropolar continua are characterized by a higher number of kinematical and dynamical descriptors than classical continua and related stress and strain measures, namely the micro-rotation gradient (curvature) and the relative rotation with their work conjugated counterparts, the micro-couple, and the skew-symmetric part of the stress, respectively. The presence of such enriched strain and stress fields can be detected especially when concentrated forces and/or geometric discontinuities are present. The effectiveness of the micropolar model to represent the mechanical behavior of materials made of particles of prominent size has been widely proved in the literature, in this paper we focus on the capability of this model to grossly capture the behavior of anisotropic solids under concentrated loads for which the relative strain, that is a peculiar strain measure of the micropolar model, can have a salient role. The effect of material anisotropy in the load diffusion has been investigated and highlighted with the aid of numerical parametric analyses, performed for two dimensional bodies with increasing degrees of anisotropy using a finite element approach specifically conceived for micropolar media with quadratic elements implemented within Comsol Multiphysics© framework. The present studied cases show that a significant diffusion and redistribution of the load is due to an increasing in the level of material anisotropy.