ABSTRACT
The Voronoi cell finite element method (VCFEM) has been developed in [147, 149, 150, 275, 276, 414, 199, 246, 245, 244] for efficient and accurate micromechanical modeling of materials with non-uniform heterogeneous microstructures. Examples of such materials are composites and alloys containing particulates or precipitates, fibers or whiskers, micro-cracks or micro-voids in the microstructure. VCFEM is able to effectively model non-uniform dispersions, shapes, and sizes of heterogeneities as acquired from material micrographs. It has been developed to yield a high level of accuracy with significantly reduced degrees of freedom compared to the conventional displacementbased finite element models. Computational efficiency can be substantially enhanced, even as high as ∼ 100 times conventional FEM codes. Pre-processing
efforts for generating microstructural meshes and models are also drastically reduced due to the fact that Voronoi cells represent the natural neighborhood of heterogeneities in the microstructure. This property has been harnessed in VCFEM to provide a link between microstructural characterization and analysis for mechanical response in [155, 156, 240, 241].
