Micromechanics and effective transverse elastic moduli of composites with randomly located aligned circular fibers

Based on the two-dimensional (plane-strain)micromechanical fiber interaction framework, effective transverse elastic moduli of two-phase brittle matrix composites containing many randomly located yet unidirectionally aligned circular fibers are investigated in this paper. The fibers are characterized as infinitely long and equal-sized inclusions. By employing the local pairwise fiber interaction formulation coupled with the ensemble-area averaged field equations, the proposed approximate analysis leads to a novel, higher-order (in fiber volume fraction), and accurate method for the prediction of effective transverse elastic moduli of two-phase fiber reinforced composites. In addition, the proposed micromechanicai approach is extended to predict the effective transverse shear velocities of fiber suspensions with randomly located aligned rigid fibers. Comparisons with experimental data, Hashin's variational bounds, and improved three-point bounds are also presented to illustrate the predictive capability of the proposed method for fiber-reinforced composites.