Macroscopic damage in periodic composite materials

In this paper a simple way to describe the eects of microscopic damage on the global behaviour of periodic composite materials is shown. The microscopic damage is interpreted as a local reduction in material stiness as presented in Zohdi et al. (1998). Choosing the damage parameters in an opportune manner a great variety of dierent damage constitutive laws can be studied. The macroscopic constitutive law for damaged periodic composites is obtained with a homogenization procedure described in Pellegrino et al. (1999). A comparison between the results of homogeneous and heterogeneous constitutive models is shown.