2D micromechanical modeling and simulation of Ta-particles reinforced bulk metallic glass matrix composite

Abstract

The influence of particle shape, orientation, and volume fractions, as well as loading conditions, on the mechanical behavior of Ta particles reinforced with bulk metallic glass matrix composite is investigated in this work. A Matlab program is developed to output the MSC.Patran Command Language (PCL) in order to generate automatically two-dimensional (2D) micromechanical finite element (FE) models, in which particle shapes, locations, orientations, and dimensions are determined through a few random number generators. With the help of the user-defined material subroutine (UMAT) in ABAQUS, an implicit numerical method based on the free volume model has been implemented to describe the mechanical response of bulk metallic glass. A series of computational experiments are performed to study the influence of particle shapes, orientations, volume fractions, and loading conditions of the representative volume cell (RVC) on its composite mechanical properties.