Micromechanical modeling and simulation provide an important approach for analyzing the effects of material inhomogeneity and anisotropy over a range of microscopic length scales. The model and approach also account for the real arbitrary microstructural morphologies. A fully dynamic kinetic framework and finite deformation kinematic formulation are used. Mesh independence of solution is studied and verified. Idealized microstructures containing circular and elliptical particles and real microstructures with arbitrary morphologies are used to investigate the effects of phase morphologies, phase size and phase anisotropy on fracture of this ceramic composite system.
Numerical results show that microstructural variations give rise to a range of fracture resistance.
Higher fracture resistance is obtained from microstructures with fine evenly distributed microstructural reinforcement entities. The failure mode is found to be significantly influenced by the interfacial bonding strength between the phases. Two distinct failure modes are observed for strong and weak bonding. The loading rate effects are also investigated. It is found that energy release rate increases with loading rates.