Statistical analysis of the mechanical properties of nacre

A representative model of nacre (mother-of-pearl) was modelled using the finite element software Abaqus to determine the material heterogeneity effect on the overall material behaviour. Nacre constitutes of aragonite tablets (95% Vol) and organic bio polymer layers (5% Vol) arranged in a staggered manner.The tablets were assigned with homogeneous isotropic elastic properties,whereas the constitutive behaviour of bio polymer layers were defined using a cohesive law whose parameters were stochastically generated according to a continuous distribution. Later, the model was imposed with periodic boundary conditions and Monte Carlo simulations were carried out on the random samples subjected to uni-axial tension. It was observed that the heterogeneous material exhibited non uniform failure pattern as compared to the homogeneous material which exhibited an unrealistic uniform failure pattern.Moreover, it was also observed that the RVE size had significant impact on the mean tensile peak strength as well on the standard deviation of the tensile peak strength.