Abstract
In this paper, an icosahedral non-body-centered model is presented to simulate the periodic structure of a general class of homogeneous particulate composites, by predicting the particle arrangement. This model yielded three different variations, which correspond to three different deterministic particle configurations. In addition, the concept of a boundary interphase between matrix and inclusions was taken into account. In this framework, the influence of particle vicinity on the thermomechanical properties of the overall material was examined in parallel with the concept of boundary interphase. The simultaneous consideration of these two basic influential factors constitutes the novelty of this work. Next, by the use of this advanced model, the authors derived a closed-form expression to estimate the thermal conductivity of this type of composite. To test the validity of the model, the theoretical predictions arising from the proposed formula were compared with experimental data found in the literature, together with theoretical results obtained from several accurate formulae derived from other workers, and an adequate accordance was observed.
Highlights
It is known that thermal conductivity constitutes a fundamental property of solids, and the attainment of its theoretical predictions—especially for composites—is a very difficult task, as the thermal conducting mechanism mainly depends on their microstructure [1]
We demonstrated that the second variation of the presented icosahedral model was selected for the calculation of thermal volume fraction, which is attributed to the fact that the interphase is somewhat of an altered matrix
It is evident that the proposed formula for thermal conductivity yielded much better theoretical predictions when compared with inverse mixing laws for two and three phases and the other five theoretical formulae [9,10,17,24,25] which were derived on the basis of multiphase forms of the inverse law of mixtures given that the application of the standard rule of mixtures cannot take place to evaluate this bulk property of a particulate composite
Summary
It is known that thermal conductivity constitutes a fundamental property of solids, and the attainment of its theoretical predictions—especially for composites (periodic or not)—is a very difficult task, as the thermal conducting mechanism mainly depends on their microstructure [1]. The prediction of the thermomechanical properties of composite materials (fibrous or particulate) is a very interesting topic, given that their properties depend on several parameters (e.g., the individual constituent properties, the filler size and volume concentration, the adhesion efficiency between inclusions and matrix, the filler distribution and possible vicinity, etc.). In this framework, Hashin and Hashin et al [2,3] assumed that a particulate composite material is a collection of small-volume elements of various sizes and shapes which densely fill the composite. Maxwell [5] provided a general basis for estimating the effective thermal conductivity of particulate composites, whereas in References [6,7,8] some remarkable theoretical and empirical approaches were presented to analyze the thermal conductivity of composites
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