Predictive capabilities of micromechanical models for composite materials

Technology development is tied strongly to our ability to engineer materials that cope with the fast evolving requirements of innovative products. The best way to build this ability is by establishing a material design process from atomic scale to the system scale. An important building block of this process is micromechanical models that bridge microscale to mesoscale. Unfortunately, current micromechanical models remain short from material design perspective. To be able to improve these models, one must first assess and apprehend their prediction capabilities. In this respect, this paper seeks to analyze and compare some prominent micromechanical models with the objective to emphasize those capable of evaluating accurately the effective properties for composites. These models can, then, be candidates for a potential integration in the material design process. This work begins, therefore, with an overview of some well-known models, namely Mori–Tanaka model, self-consistent model, Lielen’s model, effective self-consistent, and its extension interaction direct derivative. The double-inclusion model in its original and new version is introduced and explained. Subsequently, the limitations of all the aforementioned models are discussed and their predictions in the case of both two-phase and multiphase composites are compared. Consequently, it is shown that the improved Double-inclusion model version of Aboutajeddine and Neale can be seen as a unified model, which includes some of the previously existing models as special cases. In addition, this last model is the only model that gives satisfactory predictions in the case of multiphase composite materials.