Obtaining Cosserat material parameters by homogenization of a Cauchy continuum

An increasing importance of composites with sandwich architecture and fibre‐reinforced components is recognizable especially in aerospace and light weight industry. Due to the inner structure such materials often exhibit a complex behavior. If the ratio of micro‐ and macroscopic length scales, l and L, violates the condition l/L ≪ 1, a higher order continuum should be used to describe the macroscopic material behavior correctly. The numerical simulation requires reliable material constants, for which the experimental determination is laborious and sometimes impossible. Alternatively homogenization methods can be used for the numerical identification of overall material parameters. A short introduction to the linear Cosserat theory is followed by an extended homogenization procedure to derive the macroscopic material constants of a linear Cosserat continuum. The parameters obtained with a heterogeneous cell are used to simulate different bending load cases. (© 2009 Wiley‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)