Development of special bi-material elements

Abstract

A procedure for developing bi-material elements, which are able to eliminate the weakness of the conventional finite elements in determining the stress distributions along fibre-matrix interfaces, has been proposed. The results obtained by these bi-material elements are in good agreement with the experimental results and are superior to the conventional finite element results. A comparison is made between the proposed approach of improving the interfacial stress calculations and another approach which employs the least square fitting method. The comparison shows that the two approaches provide comparable accuracy but the latter is more difficult to implement.