NEW METHOD TO GENERATE 3-POINT BOUNDS ON EFFECTIVE PROPERTIES OF COMPOSITES - APPLICATION TO VISCOELASTICITY

The general goal of this paper is to develop a new approach for boundi ng the effective moduli (e.g. elastic moduli, conductivity, or thermal expansion coefficients) of composite materials. Specifically, this pa per aims to: (1) formulate a procedure that combines the translation m ethod and the Beran procedure into one powerful method that has the ad vantages of both approaches; and (2) apply the new method to study eff ective properties of viscoelastic composites. The new method enables o ne to get the most restrictive three-point geometrical-parameter bound s. In particular, we obtain new three-point bounds on the complex bull ; modulus of an isotropic viscoelastic composite. The new bounds are g iven by the outermost of several circular arcs in the complex bulk mod ulus plane. They take into account three-point statistical information and thus are much more restrictive than previously known two-point bo unds. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.