Application of three-dimensional (3D) woven composites is growing as an alternative to the use of ply-based composite materials. However, the design, analysis, modeling, and optimization of these materials is more challenging due to their complex and inherently multiscale geometries. Herein, a multiscale modeling procedure, based on efficient, semi-analytical micromechanical theories rather than the traditional finite element approach, is presented and applied to a 3D woven carbon–epoxy composite. A crack-band progressive damage model was employed for the matrix constituent to capture the globally observed nonlinear response. Realistic microstructural dimensions and tow-fiber volume fractions were determined from detailed X-ray computed tomography (CT) and scanning electron microscopy data. Pre-existing binder-tow disbonds and weft-tow waviness, observed in X-ray CT scans of the composite, were also included in the model. The results were compared with experimental data for the in-plane tensile and shear behavior of the composite. The tensile predictions exhibited good correlations with the test data. While the model was able to capture the less brittle nature of the in-plane shear response, quantitative measures were underpredicted to some degree.

The High-Fidelity Generalized Method of Cells (HFGMC) is one technique, distinct from traditional finite-element approaches, for accurately simulating nonlinear composite material behavior. In this work, the HFGMC global system of equations for doubly periodic repeating unit cells with nonlinear constituents has been reduced in size through the novel application of a Petrov-Galerkin Proper Orthogonal Decomposition order-reduction scheme in order to improve its computational efficiency. Order-reduced models of an E-glass/Nylon 12 composite led to a 4.8–6.3x speedup in the equation assembly/solution runtime while maintaining model accuracy. This corresponded to a 21–38% reduction in total runtime. The significant difference in assembly/solution and total runtimes was attributed to the evaluation of integration point inelastic field quantities; this step was identical between the unreduced and order-reduced models. Nonetheless, order-reduced techniques offer the potential to significantly improve the computational efficiency of multiscale calculations.

A convolutional neural network was used to enhance the localization of strain and stress for a generalized method of cells model of a metallic microstructure. Enhanced shear strains, measured in terms of the linear regression coefficients as a function of ground truth strains, were improved from inaccurate and uncorrelated ($\mathrm{slope}=0.003$ , $r^2=0.000$ ) to accurate and well correlated ($\mathrm{slope}=0.961$ , $r^2=0.946$ ) relative to ground truth ($\mathrm{slope}=1.0$ , $r^2=1.0$ ). Kernel sizes of 2 or 3 were effective in the convolutional neural network (padding = “same”). graphical processing unit (GPU)-parallelized enhancement costs were low after training (range 0.41–3.45%) compared to the baseline generalized method of cells, and are significantly faster than finite element. The accuracy of enhanced localized shear strains and stress is expected to yield benefits for damage progression models, especially in the context of hierarchical multiscale methods where the generalized method of cells is applied at the intermediate scale.