Evaluation of the appropriate size of the finite element representative volume for filled rubber composite analyses

Abstract

The appropriate size of the representative volume element (RVE) for filled rubber composite is investigated where the volume fraction of the filler is about 20%. The micro structures of the composite are obtained by the measurement with 3-dimensional transmission electron microscope tomography (3D-TEMT) at resolution of about 1nm in each direction. Numerical simulations of static elongation have been conducted by finite element method (FEM) with various sizes of RVEs where the FEM models are created by applying voxel technique to the measured data. A highly parallelized FEM program, FrontISTR, and up to 4096 cores of K computer are utilized because the largest FEM models have nearly 200-million degrees of freedom (DOFs). Two different filler dispersion states of the composite material are examined.