Particle Shape Complexity Reduction for Estimation of Effective Elastic Properties of the Composite

The material development is an expensive process, especially considering composite materials as their microstructure can be very complex. Particle reinforced composites in particular can consist of particles with complicated shapes. Traditionally ellipsoid approximations are used to reduce shape complexity, which comes at the drawback of neglecting the influence of the particles shape onto the composite mechanical properties. The computational method as proposed in this work employs particle swarm optimization in combination with the FE method to create spherical equivalents, which reduces the complexity but also stores the particle shape information. The proposed method can minimize the development cost of new particle reinforced composite materials, while increasing the spectrum of evaluated material features.