Composite material identification as micropolar continua via an optimization approach

A strategy based on material homogenization and heuristic optimization for the structural identification of composite materials is proposed. The objective is the identification of the constitutive properties of a micropolar continuum model employed to describe the mechanical behaviour of a composite material made of rigid blocks and thin elastic interfaces. The micropolar theory (Cosserat) has been proved to be capable of properly accounting for the particles arrangements as well as their size and orientation. The constitutive parameters of the composite materials, characterized by different textures and dimensions of the rigid blocks, are identified through a homogenization procedure. Thus, the identification is repeated exploiting the static or modal response of the composite materials and using the Differential Evolution algorithm. The benchmark structures assumed as target are represented by discrete models implemented in ABAQUS where the blocks and the elastic interfaces are modelled by rigid bodies and elastic interfaces, respectively. The obtained results show that proposed strategies provide accurate results paving the way to the experimental validation and in field applications.