RVE Analysis in LS-DYNA for High-fidelity Multiscale Material Modeling

In modern engineering designs, advanced materials (e.g., fiber/particle-reinforced polymers, metallic alloys, laminar composites, etc.) are widely used, where microscale heterogeneities such as grains, inclusions, voids, micro-cracks, and interfaces significantly affect the macroscopic constitutive behaviors. Obviously, an accurate description of the multiscale material behaviors is of great importance to the success of material design and structural analysis. The Representative Volume Element (RVE) analysis method provides a rigorous means to obtain homogenized macroscopic material properties at the upper length scale from the properties of the material constituents and structures at a lower length scale. Recently, we have developed an RVE module (keyword: *RVE_ANALYSIS_FEM) in the multiphysics simulation software LS-DYNA to enable high-fidelity virtual testing of numerically re-constructed material samples at user-specified characteristic length scales. In this article, a brief introduction to this new feature will be given.