Predicting the Combined Optical and Thermal Response of Polymer Matrix Composites with Varying Composite Properties

Abstract

The effective optical and thermal properties as well as the opto-thermal response of composite materials are investigated. A stochastic method is developed which implements a random microstructure generation (RMG) algorithm to produce a synthetic microstructure representing the geometry of unidirectional continuous fiber reinforced polymer matrix composites (PMCs). Simulation of the synthetic microstructure determines effective thermal properties, effective optical properties, and the thermal response to optical energy. The micromechanics framework developed herein is also applied to unit cell analysis and compared with analytical solutions. The metrics of effective transverse thermal conductivity, effective attenuation coefficient, and temperature response are studied as a function of fiber volume fraction. We show that some composites’ effective thermal properties can be adequately predicted using unit cell analysis or analytic techniques; however, effective optical properties and thermal response to optical input depend strongly the specific random arrangement of the fibers.