Short fiber reinforced metals (SFRMs) have shown promising mechanical properties at elevated temperature, [1] leading to applications for combustion engines where some components locally reinforced with short fibers (SFs) have been developed. [2][3][4] To ensure the reliability of such materials under long-term temperature/load exposure, the mechanisms controlling their thermomechanical behavior are to be known.In previous studies, [3,5] an SF reinforced AlSi12CuMgNi alloy showed a decrease in stationary creep rate with the creep exposure time extending several thousand hours at 300 8C. Microtomographic evaluations [5] revealed microstructural changes of the Si phase, specially of the interconnectivity between Si, SFs, and intermetallics.Models of creep behavior of SFRM have focused on the spatial arrangement of the fibers, [6] the influence of damage, [7] the work hardened zone between matrix and fibers, [8][9][10] and the constitutive creep law of the matrix material [11] but few have studied the influence of the interpenetrating architecture of the rigid phases (e.g., ref.[12]).In the present investigation a three-dimensional (3D) unit cell finite element (FE) model is proposed in order to study the influence of the 3D connectivity between Si and SFs on the creep resistance of AlSi-based SFRM. This simple model is based on 3D microstructural features and it is correlated with experimental results.
Experimental