LAUSR

Abstract The thermoelastic behavior of composites reinforced by coated spheres is studied by a number of analytical models and by periodic homogenization. The analytical approaches mainly use the well-known two-step strategy of first homogenizing the core–shell particles and then inserting the resulting equivalent elasticity tensors into two-phase models. Equivalent elasticities are either generated from existing results for dilute strain concentration tensors or taken directly from the literature. In addition to finding the homogenized properties, localization relations that are consistent within the mean-field equivalent inhomogeneity framework are used to evaluate the phase averaged microfields. Comparisons with the numerical predictions are carried out for four sets of constituent data that cover a considerable range of elastic contrasts. Combining the exact Herve–Zaoui results on dilute concentration factors with either the three-point estimates or the differential scheme is found to lead to excellent agreement with the numerical predictions.