Development of special bi-material elements

A procedure for developing bi-material elements which are able to eliminate the weakness of the conventional finite elements in determining the stress distributions along fibre-matrix interfaces, has been proposed The results obtained by these bi-material elements are in good agreement with the expe rimental results and are superior to the conventional finite element result s A comparison is made between the proposed approach of improving the inter facial stress calculations and another approach which employs the least squ are fitting method The comparison shows that the two approaches provide com parable accuracy but the latter is more difficult to implement.