THERMO-MECHANICAL BEHAVIOR STUDIES OF SHORT FIBER COMPOSITE

By virtue of Eshelby's equivalent inclusion method, this paper focuses on thermal- mechanical formulations of composites containing elliptic short fibers. Numerical experiments are carried out to deter mine the stresses near short fiber inclusions and thermal expansion coefficients of the whole composites. It is shown that there exist strong nonlinear thermal- mechanical characteristics for composites containing prolate elliptic inclusion. For oblate elliptic inhomogeneities, the thermo-mechanical coefficients of the composite vary linearly.