Effective Properties of Homogenised Nonlinear Viscoelastic Composites

Abstract

We develop a general approach for the computation of the effective properties of nonlinear viscoelastic composites. For this purpose, we employ the asymptotic homogenisation technique to decouple the equilibrium equation into a set of local problems. The theoretical framework is then specialised to the case of a strain energy density of the Saint-Venant type, with the second Piola–Kirchhoff stress tensor also featuring a memory contribution. Within this setting, we frame our mathematical model in the case of infinitesimal displacements and employ the correspondence principle which results from the use of the Laplace transform. In doing this, we obtain the classical cell problems in asymptotic homogenisation theory for linear viscoelastic composites and look for analytical solutions of the associated anti-plane cell problems for fibre-reinforced composites. Finally, we compute the effective coefficients by specifying different types of constitutive laws for the memory terms and compare our results with available data in the scientific literature.