A Self-Consistent Approach to the Elastic Stiffness of Short-Fiber Composites

Abstract

The self-consistent approach originally proposed by Hill has been adopted to derive the effective elastic stiffness constants of unidirectional short-fiber composites. The short-fibers are modeled as ellipsoidal inclu sions uniformly distributed in the matrix and the transverse isotropy of the composite has been taken into account. The method of analysis is valid for multi-component systems and hence, applicable to hybrid composites. Comparisons of this analysis with existing theories are made for binary composites.