  In modern engineering designs, advanced materials (e.g.,
fiber/particle-reinforced polymers, metallic alloys, laminar composites, etc.)
are widely used, where microscale heterogeneities such as grains, inclusions,
voids, micro-cracks, and interfaces significantly affect the macroscopic
constitutive behaviors. Obviously, an accurate description of the multiscale
material behaviors is of great importance to the success of material design and
structural analysis. The Representative Volume Element (RVE) analysis method
provides a rigorous means to obtain homogenized macroscopic material properties
at the upper length scale from the properties of the material constituents and
structures at a lower length scale. Recently, we have developed an RVE module
(keyword: *RVE_ANALYSIS_FEM) in the multiphysics simulation software LS-DYNA to
enable high-fidelity virtual testing of numerically re-constructed material
samples at user-specified characteristic length scales. In this article, a
brief introduction to this new feature will be given.
