Revisiting analytic shear-lag models for predicting creep in composite materials

Analytic shear-lag models enjoy great popularity for assessing and interpreting microstructure dependent stationary creep in fibrous metal composites, especially the formulation of Kelly-Street (Kelly and Street, 1972 [2]). Beyond the original model's scope, i.e. large aspect ratios of inclusions, predictions are highly inaccurate, which was recently pointed out by Wicht et al. (Wicht et al., 2022 [10]), by comparing model predictions to micromechanical Fast-Fourier-Transform-based simulations. In this study we therefore modify basic Kelly-Street model assumptions, concerning effective creep rate, stress transfer and inclusion spacing to arrive at a modified model with an extended scope. To validate the modified model, we benchmark the model against Fast-Fourier-Transform-based micromechanical simulations. We show, that the proposed modifications are successful in extending the model's scope to inclusions with small aspect ratios ≤20. Thus, the reformulated model is a powerful tool to describe and interpret microstructure dependent creep.