“…With these effective properties, the analyst can replace the original heterogeneous structure with a homogeneous one and carry out structural analysis for global behavior. In the past several decades, numerous micromechanical approaches have been suggested in the literature, such as the self-consistent model (Hill, 1965;Dvorak and BaheiEl-Din, 1979;Accorsi and Nemat-Nasser, 1986), the variational approach (Hashin and Shtrikman, 1962;Milton, 2001), the method of cells (Aboudi, 1982(Aboudi, , 1989Paley and Aboudi, 1992;Williams, 2005), recursive cell method (Banerjee and Adams, 2004), mathematical homogenization theories (Bensoussan et al, 1978;Sanchez-Palencia, 1980;Murakami and Toledano, 1990), finite element approaches using conventional stress analysis of a representative volume element (Sun and Vaidya, 1996), variational asymptotic method for unit cell homogenization (VAMUCH) (Yu, 2005;Yu and Tang, 2007), and many others (see, e.g. Hollister and Kikuchi (1992), Kalamkarov et al (2009), Kanouté et al (2009) for a review).…”