Effective mechanical properties of concentric cylindrical composites with auxetic phase

Materials with unusual mechanical properties can be potentially used as matrices to create high-performance lightweight composites. The appearance of materials with negative Poisson's ratio (auxetics), has led to the evaluation of auxetic composites for possible engineering applications. Because the experimental evaluation of composites with specific properties is expensive and time consuming, computational modelling and simulation provide efficient alternatives to predict the parameters of the composites. In this paper a finite element method was used to find the engineering constants (Young's modulus and Poisson's ratio) of auxetic composites consisting of concentric cylindrical inclusions made of combinations of auxetic and classic (non-auxetic) materials. It has been observed that not only the mechanical properties of the different composite phases influence the effective mechanical properties of the whole composite, but also the location of the same material phases do matter.