Because of their high surface over volume ratio, the mechanical behavior of micrometer sized structures differs from that of usual macroscopic objects. Their surface plays a key role, and this property has been proposed to devise micromechanical sensors of environmental changes [1]. In particular, a significant effort has been put on the development of biological sensors [2], thus highlighting ...

The present work deals with crystal plasticity of single crystal nickel-base superalloys. In this context, a scale transition of transferring information from mesoscale towards a physically justified micromechanical model is shown. A numerical coupling between dislocation dynamic simulations and the finite element method, the socalled Discrete-Continuous Model (DCM) is used in order to take int...

One of the most famous methods to predict the stiffness of short fiber composites is micromechanical modeling. In this study, a Representative Volume Element (RVE) of a beech wood flour natural composite has been designed and the orientation averaging approach has been utilized to predict its stiffness tensor. The novelty of this work is in finding the proper fiber orientation distribution func...

[1] Measurements of snow using a high-resolution micropenetrometer can be used to discriminate between different snow types; in lower-density snow the signal is sensitive to microstructure, and micromechanical properties can be estimated. Although a physics-based snow penetration theory was first developed almost a decade ago, since that time the majority of studies using snow micropenetrometer...

A two-scale model for predicting the multiple crack growth in viscoelastic solids due to an impact is presented. The cracks are considered only at the local scale through the use of a micromechanical viscoelastic cohesive zone model. The multiscale model has been implemented in a finite-element code. In order to minimize the computation time, the local finite-element meshes are solved in parall...