Multiscale modelling and simulation of polymer nanocomposites using transformation field analysis (TFA)

High performance fibre-reinforced polymers (FRP) have successfully been established in the aerospace industry. The performance of epoxy resins used for carbon fibre reinforced plastics can be significantly improved by the incorporation of nanoparticles. A Transformation field analysis (TFA) proposed by Dvorak and co-workers is utilized to predict the properties of a representative volume of inelastic heterogeneous materials consisting of polymers and nanoparticles. Thus, the TFA method at the nanoscale can be implemented as a user routine integrated into RVE micro scale model, where the modified matrix is reinforced by a certain volume fraction of aligned fibres. This yields to save computational resources and time in combination with good efficiency compared to todays established multiscale approaches. To the author's knowledge, this is the first implementation of the TFA method for three-dimensional nanocomposites problems. Finally, a single nano level application based TFA approach and numerical multi-scale (micro/FEA-nano/TFA) application are implemented to verify the behaviour of elastic-plastic epoxy nanocomposite consisting of agglomerating fillers in nano-scale and reinforced by aligned fibres in micro-scale under different external loads. To validate this multiscale approach, a multiscale approach based TFA micro scale and TFA nano scale is processed.