Abstract
The purpose of this work was to study the influence of microstructure on effective transverse thermal behavior of unidirectional fiber reinforced composites. Three types of microstructures are taken into account, including square periodic, hexagonal periodic and random arrangements of circular fibers. Unlike classical results at low fiber volume fractions and low thermal conductivity contrast between fibers and matrices, results provided by finite elements simulations for copper matrix composite reinforced with Carbon T-300 fibers have shown that random microstructures strongly affect the effective thermal properties of unidirectional composites for both high volume fractions and thermal conductivity contrast and can give closer predictions to the experimental results than the regular microstructures and the theoretical model.
Highlights
Unidirectional fiber reinforced composites [1] used for most engineering applications can be regarded as homogeneous materials with transversely isotropic/anisotropic properties from a macroscopic view
It has been revealed that the macro-level behavior of unidirectional composite is usually controlled by its microstructure including constituent properties, fiber volume fraction, fiber shape as well as fiber arrangement
The influences of fiber volume fraction and the thermal property contrast are investigated for both the regualr and random samples
Summary
Unidirectional fiber reinforced composites [1] used for most engineering applications can be regarded as homogeneous materials with transversely isotropic/anisotropic properties from a macroscopic view. For the purpose of simplicity, the fiber arrangement in unidirectional composite follows an assumption that the fibers are dispersed in the matrix with regular pattern, i.e. the square pattern or the hexagonal pattern, so that a simple micromechanical unit cell model can be taken out from the composite for further homogenization analysis [2,3,4]. Such assumption is different to the real distribution of fibers in the matrix material. How to assess the influence of randomly dispersed fibers to the effective thermal properties of composites have to be paid more attention [6]
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