Prof. Thomas Böhlke
Celine Lauff (M.Sc.)

Methodological focus: theory and numerics
Specialisation in mechanics desired
No FEM knowledge necessary
 

M.Sc. Celine Lauff

Topic Description:

Due to their high specific stiffness and strength, fibre-reinforced composites are often used in lightweight construction. As a result of typical manufacturing processes, such as injection moulding, they have random and highly anisotropic microstructures. The length, orientation, volume fraction and curvature of the fibres have a significant effect on the mechanical properties of the composite. In order to calculate the effective properties using computational homogenisation methods, a geometrically complete description of the microstructure is required that adequately represents the real microstructures. The subject of current research is microstructure generation.

The aim of this work is to further develop existing microstructure generation algorithms for fibre-reinforced composites and to investigate the representativeness of the generated microstructures. For this purpose suitable approaches from the literature and then implement them in Python/Cython. After successful implementation, the effective properties of the generated microstructures will be determined using Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) based simulation software and studies on the influence of the implemented approaches on the effective properties will be carried out.