MICROMECHANICAL BEHAVIOR OF A LAMINA

Just as there must be some rationale for selecting a particular stiffness and/or strength of material for a specific structural application, there must also be a rationale for determining how best to achieve that stiffness and strength for a composite of two or more materials. That is, how can the percentages of the constituent materials be varied so as to arrive at the desired composite stiffness and strength  

An appropriate division of the efforts just mentioned is helped by defining two areas of composite material behavior, micromechanics and macromechanics  

Micromechanics — The study of composite material behavior wherein the interaction of the constituent materials is examined in detail as part of the definition of the behavior of the heterogeneous composite material. 

The mechanics of materials (or strength of materials or resistance of materials) approach embodies the usual concept of vastly simplifying assumptions regarding the hypothesized behavior of the mechanical system. The elasticity approach actually is at least three approaches (1) bounding principles, (2) exact solutions, and (3) approximate solutions. 

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The micromechanical behavior of a lamina was treated in Chapter 3. Both a mechanics of materials and an elasticity approach were used to predict the fundamental lamina stiffnesses that were compared to measured stiffnesses. Mechanics of materials approaches were used to predict some of the fundamental strengths of a lamina. 

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