Effective mechanical properties of fiber-reinforced composites strongly depend on the microstructure, including the fibers' orientation. Studying this dependency, we identify the variety of fiber orientation tensors up to fourth-order using irreducible tensors and material symmetry. The case of planar fiber orientation tensors, relevant for sheet molding compound, is presented completely. Consequences for the reconstruction of fiber distributions and mean field homogenization are presented.

A discontinuous fiber-reinforced thermoset material produced by the Sheet Molding Compound process is investigated. Due to the process-related fiber orientation distribution, a composite with an anisotropic microstructure is created which crucially affects the mechanical properties. The central objectives are the modeling of the thermoelastic behavior of the composite accounting for the underlying microstructure, and the experimental characterization of the pure resin and the composite material.

We investigate deep material networks (DMN). We lay the mathematical foundation of DMNs and present a novel DMN formulation, which is characterized by a reduced number of degrees of freedom. We present a efficient solution technique for nonlinear DMNs to accelerate complex two-scale simulations with minimal computational effort. A new interpolation technique is presented enabling the consideration of fluctuating microstructure characteristics in macroscopic simulations.

Materials of industrial interest often show a complex microstructure which directly influences their macroscopic material behavior. For simulations on the component scale, multi-scale methods may exploit this microstructural information. This work is devoted to a multi-scale approach for brittle materials. Based on a homogenization result for free discontinuity problems, we present FFT-based methods to compute the effective crack energy of heterogeneous materials with complex microstructures.

Computational homogenization permits to capture the influence of the microstructure on the cyclic mechanical behavior of polycrystalline metals. In this work we investigate methods to compute Laguerre tessellations as computational cells of polycrystalline microstructures, propose a new method to assign crystallographic orientations to the Laguerre cells and use Bayesian optimization to find suitable parameters for the underlying micromechanical model from macroscopic experiments.

Wir präsentieren einen Algorithmus zur schnellen Erzeugung von SMC Mikrostrukturen hoher Güte, durch Verwendung einer exakten Schließung und eines quasi-zufälligen Samplings. Darüber hinaus stellen wir ein modulares Framework zur Modellierung anisotroper Schädigung vor. Unser Konzept der Extraktionstensoren und Schädigungsfunktionen ermöglicht die Beschreibung komplexer Vorgänge. Darüber hinaus schlagen wir einen ganzheitlichen Multiskalenansatz zur Bestimmung anisotroper Versagenskriterien vor. - We introduce an algorithm that allows for a fast generation of SMC composite microstructures. An exact closure approximation and a quasi-random orientation sampling ensure high fidelity. Furthermore, we present a modular framework for anisotropic damage evolution. Our concept of extraction tensors and damage-hardening functions enables the description of complex damage-degradation. In addition, we propose a holistic multiscale approach for constructing anisotropic failure criteria.