Date of Award

Summer 1994

Document Type

Thesis - Restricted

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Physics

First Advisor

Day, Art

Second Advisor

Karkheck, John

Third Advisor

Mendelson, Kenneth S.

Abstract

Composite materials play an increasingly important role in materials science. Understanding the relation between their effective properties and their microstructure will greatly enhance our ability to make better composite materials. It will also improve the ability for non-destructive materials analysis. This thesis will establish a methodology to calculate an effective property, the impedance spectroscopy data, of a model composite material with a given microstructure. We show how to calculate the effective impedance based on a finite element method solution of Maxwell's equations. By adopting the complex conjugate gradient method and using a new numerical approach which dramatically reduces the data storage requirement and computer time, we can study samples which are an order of magnitude larger than in previous studies. The same technique can be used in the calculation of other effective properties. This thesis leads to a great step in the numerical analysis of composite materials.

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