3. Homogenization and Applications to Material Sciences
Doina Cioranescu · Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics eBooks · 2003
The homogenization method has many important, practical applications in material sciences since composites are commonly used in industry. The interest in these materials comes from the fact that a composite has, in general, better characteristics than those of its components. Computational methods, in the case where the composite has a very large number of heterogeneities, are difficult to implement and the discontinuities (or oscillations) constitute a source of errors. This is why one tries to describe the overall behavior of composite materials by taking into account the local characteristics of the heterogeneities, and the theory of the homogenization was precisely introduced to tackle this challenge.