Digital Material Representation as an efficient tool for strain inhomogeneities analysis at the micro scale level

The summary of recent research towards development of a tool for detailed microstructure modelling is presented within the paper. The main focus is put on micro scale behaviour, where advantages of digital material representation can be taken into account. Digital Material Representation allows modelling of microstructures along with features such as crystallographic orientation, grain boundaries or phase boundaries represented in an explicit manner. Incorporation of these digital microstructures into the numerical simulation methods provides the possibility to improve the quality of numerical results. The developed method can be used to design specifically dedicated microstructures, which meet very strict requirements. The clear motivation and importance of the work is presented in the first part of the paper followed by a short description of the developed approaches for creation of the digital microstructures. Two approaches are considered that provide an exact and statistical representation of the real microstructure. The main focus is put on the application of image processing and cellular automata techniques. Afterwards, obtained digital microstructures are used as input data for the finite element analysis of the micro scale compression test. Examples of applications during multiscale simulation are also presented in the paper.