Effect of pore distribution on the statistics of peak stress and overall properties of porous material

Abstract

This paper addresses the effect of pore distribution on the overall properties and local stress fields in a porous material. Thermal and elastic fields in materials with uniform microstructure are compared with those of materials containing distinguishable clusters of circular or elliptic shape. The numerical simulation combines multipole expansion of local fields with the multi-particle unit cell method. Our work demonstrates that statistics of the peak stresses follow Gumbel’s rule derived for statistics of extreme values and are directly related to statistics of nearest neighbors. Based on this correspondence, an analytical expression for statistics of maximal stresses in a porous material with arbitrary microstructure is constructed in terms of porosity and statistics of minimal distances between the nearest neighbors. At the same time, the numerical analysis indicates that overall elastic constants and thermal (or electrical) conductivity are almost insensitive to the actual distribution of pores – uniform or with distinguishable pore clusters – at least in the examined interval of porosity (up to 50%).