Numerical Simulation on the Effective Thermal Conductivity of Porous Material

Abstract

The thermal conductivity of porous material is an important basic parameter, but it is not easy to study, due to the complexity of the structure of porous material. In the present work, we show a numerical simulation method to study the thermal conductivity of the porous material. We generate 200 material models with random distribution of solid skeleton and air for a fixed porosity, then we get the effective thermal conductivity of the porous material by Monte Carlo statistical analysis. The results are in good agreement with the previous empirical formula. The numerical results show that the effective thermal conductivity of porous material depends on the thermophysical properties of solid skeleton and air, the pore distribution and pore structure, the numerical error decreases with the increase in the number of grids, this finite element method can be used to estimate the effective thermal conductivity of composites and maybe has broad application prospects in terms of computing the effective thermal conductivity and other physical properties of composite material with known components.