Characterization of the mechanical behavior of a Printed Circuit Board (PCB)

The present study deals with a characterization of the anisotropic mechanical behavior of Printed Circuit Board (PCB) through an inverse method combining experiments and numerical simulations. The considered PCB is a woven laminate composite that consists of glass fiber reinforced epoxy matrix (FR4) and copper traces. Prior to numerical simulations, some simple mechanical tests were conducted in order to characterize the mechanical behavior of layers of FR4 and the corresponding PCB. Then, through a multiscale homogenization approach, unknown elastic properties of the PCB have been estimated by comparison with experimental results. This numerical homogenization was performed by the means of the Mechanics of Structure Genome (MSG) methodology. The main advantage of this MSG-based model is its ability to simultaneously estimate all the independent components of the tensor of elastic constants through only one computation, with a relatively low CPU time.