On the Effective Elastic Properties of Macroscopically Isotropic Media Containing Randomly Dispersed Spherical Particles

Abstract

A computational scheme for estimating the effective elastic properties of a particle reinforced matrix is investigated. The randomly distributed same-sized spherical particles are assumed to result in a composite material that is macroscopically isotropic. The scheme results in a computational efficient method to establish the correct bulk and shear moduli by representing the three-dimensional (3D) structure in a two-dimensional configuration. To this end, the statistically equivalent area fraction is defined in this work, which depends on two parameters: the particle volume fraction and the number of particles in the 3D volume element. We suggest that using the statistically equivalent area fraction, introduced and defined in this work, is an efficient way to obtain the effective elastic properties of an isotropic media containing randomly dispersed same-size spherical particles.