Elastic-plastic analysis of arbitrary heterogeneous materials with the Voronoi cell finite element method (Q1913251)

A Voronoi cell finite element method is developed to solve small deformation elasto-plasticity problems for arbitrary heterogeneous materials. Dirichlet tessellation of microstructural representative materials results in a network of arbitrary-sided polygons called Voronoi cells. Each Voronoi cell encompasses one second phase heterogeneity at most. These are natural elements for the microstructure, representing the basic structural elements of the material. In this paper, formulations are developed for directly considering Voronoi cells as elements in a finite element model without any further dissection. Furthermore, a composite Voronoi cell finite element method is developed to account for the presence of the second phase within each polygonal element.