Advances in multiscale methods are presented from two perspectives which address the issue of computational complexity of optimizing and inverse analyzing nonlinear composite materials and structures at multiple scales. The optimization algorithm provides several solutions to meet the enormous computational challenge of optimizing nonlinear structures at multiple scales including: (i) enhanced sampling procedure that provides superior performance of the well-known ant colony optimization algorithm, (ii) a mapping-based meshing of a representative volume element that unlike unstructured meshing permits sensitivity analysis on coarse meshes, and (iii) a multilevel optimization procedure that takes advantage of possible weak coupling of certain scales. We demonstrate the proposed optimization procedure on elastic and inelastic laminated plates involving three scales. We also present an adaptive variant of the measure-theoretic approach (MTA) for stochastic characterization of micromechanical properties based on the observations of quantities of interest at the coarse (macro) scale.

The salient features of the proposed nonintrusive stochastic inverse solver are: identification of a nearly optimal sampling domain using enhanced ant colony optimization algorithm for multiscale problems, incremental Latin-hypercube sampling method, adaptive discretization of the parameter and observation spaces, and adaptive selection of number of samples. A complete test data of the TORAY T700GC-12K-31E and epoxy #2510 material system from the NIAR report is employed to characterize and validate the proposed adaptive nonintrusive stochastic inverse algorithm for various unnotched and open-hole laminates. Advances in Multiscale methods also provides us a unique tool to study and analyze human bones, which can be seen as a composite material, too. We used two multiscale approaches for fracture analysis of full scale femur. The two approaches are the reduced order homogenization (ROH) and the novel accelerated reduced order homogenization (AROH). The AROH is based on utilizing ROH calibrated to limited data as a training tool to calibrate a simpler, single-scale anisotropic damage model.

For bone tissue orientation, we take advantage of so-called Wolff’s law. The meso-phase properties are identified from the least square minimization of error between the overall cortical and trabecular bone properties and those predicted from the homogenization. The overall elastic and inelastic properties of the cortical and trabecular bone microstructure are derived from bone density that can be estimated from the Hounsfield units (HU). For model validation, we conduct ROH and AROH simulations of full scale finite element model of femur created from the QCT and compare the simulation results with available experimental data.