Investigating the role of hierarchy on the strength of composite materials: evidence of a crucial synergy between hierarchy and material mixing
Abstract
Natural materials are often organized in complex hierarchical architectures to optimize mechanical properties. Artificial bio-inspired materials, however, have thus far failed to successfully mimic how these architectures improve material characteristics, for example strength. Here, a method is proposed for evaluating the role of hierarchy on structural strength. To do this, we consider different hierarchical architectures of fiber bundles through analytical multiscale calculations based on a fiber bundle model at each hierarchical level. In general, we find that an increase in the number of hierarchy levels leads to a decrease in the strength of material. However, when a composite bundle with two different types of fibers is considered, an improvement in the mean strength is obtained for some specific hierarchical architectures, indicating that both hierarchy and material “
- This article is part of the themed collection: Modelling of the nanoscale