Novel implementation of homogenization method to predict effective properties of periodic materials

Representative volume element (RVE) method and asymptotic homogenization (AH) method are two widely used methods in predicting effective properties of periodic materials. This paper develops a novel implementation of the AH method, which has rigorous mathematical foundation of the AH method, and also simplicity as the RVE method. This implementation can be easily realized using commercial software as a black box, and can use all kinds of elements available in commercial software to model unit cells with rather complicated microstructures, so the model may remain a fairly small scale. Several examples were carried out to demonstrate the simplicity and effectiveness of the new implementation.