Strength analysis of bio-inspired composites reinforced by regularly and randomly staggered platelets

Bio-inspired staggered platelets reinforced composites exhibit excellent mechanical properties and thus have been widely investigated. However, the strength of these materials can hardly be estimated accurately by previous models except for some special cases. Therefore, we propose a novel model to predict the strength of composites with regularly and randomly staggered platelets. The model can account for the effects of platelet overlap, platelet offset, and normal stress at platelet ends, which are ignored or partially ignored in previous models. The model is then applied to predict the tensile strength for various platelet-matrix material systems with various platelet distributions, and shows much better agreements with simulation and experimental results than previous models, which indicates that the present model can significantly improve the accuracy of the estimation on composite tensile strength and greatly broaden the application scope of the estimation.