Exact Relations and Links for Fiber-Reinforced Elastic Composites

Abstract

Predicting the effective elastic properties of a composite material based on the elastic properties of the constituent materials is extremely difficult, even when the microstructure is known. However, there are cases where certain properties in constituents always carry over to a composite, regardless of the microstructure of the composite. We call such instances exact relations. The general theory of exact relations allows us to find all of these instances in a wide variety of contexts including elasticity, conductivity, and piezoelectricity. We combine this theory with ideas from representation theory to find all exact relations for fiber-reinforced polycrystalline composites. We further extend these ideas to the concept of links. When two composites have the same microstructure but different constituent materials, their effective tensors may be related. We use the theory of exact relations to find such relations, which we call links. In this work we describe a special set of links between elasticity tensors of fiber-reinforced polycrystalline composites. These links allow us to generalize certain results from specific examples to generate new information about this widely-used class of composites. In particular, we apply the link to obtain information about composites made from two transversely isotropic materials and polycrystals made from one orthotropic material.