Material Selection, Design and Synthesis

Composite materials offer the designer an infinite spectrum of thermo-mechanical properties through variation in constituent materials and phase architecture. It is unrealistic to use experimental methods to characterize all possible combinations of material design parameters. The preferred method is to use analytical models, which are correlated with a limited number of experiments, to select the best material for an application.

Micromechanics and effective continuum theories provide the relationship between spatially varying fields in a multi-phase material and the average response. This allows one to both determine the effective homogeneous properties of a composite material given the properties of the constituents (e.g., fibers, particles, matrix) and phase architecture (e.g., aligned or random packing) and use macroscopic quantities such as measured stress and strain to make damage predictions.

Materials Sciences Corporation is well known for developing analytical methods that allow one to gain a physical understanding of how macroscopic material behavior of a material or structure are influenced by individual constituent materials and phase architecture. Our 30-year corporate history of designing composite materials has provided us with the opportunity to develop and validate many special purpose analysis models and software.

The ability of MSC's models to handle general field properties means that thermal and electromagnetic properties can also be predicted. When composites are used in the design of radomes and other electrically active elements, the ability to tailor the electrical properties is critical, and composite test data of these physical properties is often lacking.

Dispersed Damage Coalesces Into Macro-Cracks Macro Cracks Lead To Fiber / Matrix Debonding Statistical Fiber / Matrix Characteristics Govern Material Stiffness And Strength

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