9358052 Ferrari Research will be conducted in the area of Micromechanics, that is the stress and failure analysis of inhomogeneous materials, including composites, polycrystals, granular and defective media. The research will establish relationships between the microstructure and the macroscopic properties of materials, their application to the stress and failure analyses of engineering materials and structures, and the design of advanced materials tailored for specific engineering applications. These general objectives will be pursued by the joint use of analytical, computational, and experimental methods, applied to various materials of technological relevance. The poly-inclusion method proposed earlier by the PI will be tested against further exact results. The development of additional exact and numerical results, respectively for periodic and locally non- periodic media will be undertaken. On the experimental side, ultrasonics will be used to determine simultaneously the effect elasticities and the interaction function for specific composite types, and to perform controlled-microstructure experiments. The ideas will be extended to other inhomogeneous engineering materials, including porous and damaged media, and polycrystals. Research in the area of Functionally-Graded Composites will be conducted extending previous studies on the optimal distribution of micron-size alumina particles in aluminum-based materials. Micro- Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) will be also studied. A crucial characterization technique is the Micromechanical Diffraction Method, as this yields multi-scale residual stresses, the mechanically relevant portion of the texture function, the local effective properties, and various microdistributional data.
