ABSTRACT
Elastic and dissipative behavior of composite materials depends on their internal structure and on the properties of their components (a fiber and a matrix). The character of components bond is also important. The problem of predicting effective (mean) composite characteristics on the basis of the characteristics of its constituent components is the subject of composite structural mechanics. This is a large, important, and developing branch of composite mechanics. A considerable number of methods to solve structural problems of composite mechanics were proposed, see for example References [7,16,19,31,32,45,65,85]. The methods can be divided rather conditionally into two groups. The first group can be called the group of “exact” methods that use the solutions of the theory of elasticity or cumbersome calculation procedures (for example, the finite element method). The second group is the group of approximate methods that are based on the methods of approach for the strength of materials.
