Abstract
Porous ceramics have many attractive properties, and they are often used as joint structures. Subsequently, the stress and fracture analysis at the interface is a matter of concern. Recent stress analysis by finite element method (FEM) for such heterogeneous materials is going toward the multi-scale analysis considering the microstructures and the micro-macro coupling effect. To model the very complex microstructures, the homogenization theory has been considered to be effective and accurate with the help of FEM. In the former part of this paper, 3D micro-macro coupled analysis by this theory is presented with digital image-based modeling technique. Because the homogenization theory assumes the periodic array of a unit microstructure model, however, the interface stress of joint structure can't be analyzed. Hence, a novel multi-scale method named finite element mesh superposition method is proposed. A demonstrative example of a porous ceramics joint with interface crack is presented to show the accuracy and the effectiveness of the proposed method.
