Second-order computational homogenisation enhanced with non-uniform body forces for non-linear cellular materials and metamaterials

Although "classical" multi-scale methods can capture the behaviour of cellular, including lattice, materials, when considering lattices or metamaterial local instabilities, corresponding to a change of the micro-structure morphology, classical computational homogenisation methods fail. On the one hand, first order computational homogenisation, which considers a classical continuum at the macro-scale cannot capture localisation bands inherent to cell buckling propagation. On the other hand, second-order computational homogenisation, which considers a higher order continuum at the macro-scale, introduces a size effect with respect to the Representative Volume Element (RVE) size, which is problematic when the RVE has to consider several cells to recover periodicity during local instability. In this paper we reformulate in a finite-strain setting the second-order computational homogenisation using the idea of equivalent homogenised volume. From this equivalence, arises at the micro-scale a nonuniform body force that acts as a supplementary volume term over the RVE. In the presented method, this non-uniform body-force term arises from the equivalence of energy, i.e. the Hill-Mandel condition, between the micro- and macroscopic volumes and depends mainly on the relation between the micro-scale and macro-scale deformation gradient. We show by considering elastic and elasto-plastic metamaterials and cellular materials that this approach reduces the RVE size dependency on the homogenised response. (c) 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.