Finite element estimates of viscoelastic stiffness of short glass fiber reinforced composites

An unstructured mesh Galerkin finite element method is used to obtain estimates of the viscoelastic moduli of short glass fiber reinforced polymer composites. Periodic Monte Carlo models with 125 identical inclusions are studied. Both spheroidal and spherocylindrical inclusions are considered. The estimates are compared against predictions of the dilute approximation, Mori-Tanaka (MT) and self-consistent (SC) models. It is shown that at small...