Dynamic behavior of heterogeneous neo-Hookean/Mooney–Rivlin plates reinforced nonuniformly by hyperelastic inclusions: Proposing the correct micromechanical model

Time-dependent nonlinear lateral vibrations of plates composed of a hyperelastic matrix and uniformly/nonuniformly distributed hyperelastic reinforcing inclusions are studied. Since the material constants of a hyperelastic must be extracted from the whole slope-varying stress-strain curve rather than a single slope, choosing power/exponential distributions for the material constants or using Voigt’s rule of mixtures is quite wrong. The neo-Hookean and Mooney–Rivlin constitutive models are adopted, and their results are compared. Another hint is incorporating the incompressibility condition. The governing equations of motion are derived by using Hamilton’s principle, a new energy-equivalence-based micromechanical model that can be employed for reinforcing phases with nonlinear constitutive laws, and von Kármán assumptions in the left Cauchy–Green deformation tensor, and solved by incorporation of an updating finite-element and Newmark’s techniques. Not only the displacement but typical stress results are also reported here. Results show that the neo-Hookean model overestimates the rigidity in comparison to the Mooney–Rivlin model, and unlike the elastic plates, the effect of the stiffer phase is more remarkable in the uniform distribution in comparison to the nonuniform distribution of the stiffening materials because the magnitudes of the tensile stresses of the hyperelastic plate are much larger than that of the bending stresses.