An estimation of overall properties of heterogeneous Cosserat materials

In this work, we try to answer the following question: What is the effective characteristic length of a mixture of Cosserat continua? More generally, homogenization methods for heterogeneous Cosserat media are proposed and applied to the case of linear elasticity. They first application deals with a beam network regarded as a discrete Cosserat medium and the second with a continuous heterogeneous Cosserat continuum. (orig.)