A Numerical Model for Random Fibre Networks

Modelling a random fibre network representative of a real world material leads to a large sparse linear matrix system with a high condition number. Current off-lattice networks are not a realistic model for the mechanical properties of the large volume of random fibres seen in actual materials. In this paper, we present the numerical methods employed within our two-dimensional and three-dimensional models that improve the computational time limitations seen in existing off-lattice models. Specifically, we give a performance comparison of two-dimensional random fibre networks solved iteratively with different choices of preconditioner, followed by some initial results of our three-dimensional model.