Structure property relations in short-fiber reinforced plastics

As the number of uses for variously reinforced plastics has grown, the design engineer's need for dependable approaches to property prediction for these systems has grown tremendously. It is quite clear now from experiment that one has to know not only the volume fraction of reinforcement, but also how to account for the effects of reinforcement shape and distribution in space. Most importantly, having accounted for the significant variables, any workable prediction method must be straightforward enough to use in designing without consuming huge amounts of expensive computing time.