Material evolution of defective composites

Source abstract

Beyond the defective structures (or inhomogeneities) occurring in bodies made of a single constituent, composite materials may exhibit a different kind of defectivity arising from the fact that, even if each constituent is defect-free, the incompatibility between them is a detectable entity. After defining a rigorous tensorial measure of the density of these defects, a law for its material evolution is proposed whose driving force is the presence of the defectivity itself. The model is illustrated with numerical solutions of properly formulated initial boundary value problems of systems of partial differential equations.