TAMER · Trans-Atlantic Micromechanics Evolving Research ""Materials containing inhomogeneities of diverse physical properties, shapes and orientations""""

The project addresses materials with realistic - heterogeneous and anisotropic - microstructures that contain inhomogeneities (pores/cracks/inclusions) of diverse shapes, orientations and physical properties. An important feature of such microstructures, that complicates the analysis but has a profound impact on their overall behavior, is their “irregular” character. For example, pores typically have highly diverse shapes and their orientational distribution is often neither ideally random, nor ideally parallel, but may lie in-between. The problems to be analyzed apply to a wide range of materials, both naturally occurring and man-made.The highlights of the project are(A) Expressing the anisotropic effective properties – elastic, conductive, etc. - in terms of the microstructure, realistically modeled. One of the key points is to identify the proper microstructural parameters (defect density parameters) that properly reflect the individual defect contributions to the considered overall property