Determination of the effective thermoelastic properties of cork-based agglomerates

Abstract

In this paper, a general numerical homogenisation scheme coupled with an efficient modelling strategy for predicting the effective thermoelastic properties of cork-based agglomerates is presented. In order to generate a realistic representation of the geometry and distribution of particles for the representative volume element (RVE) of the agglomerate at the mesoscopic scale, a general parametric model based on the Voronoi’s tesselation (VT) has been developed. However, the classical algorithm for VT has been enhanced by adding a full parametrization of the RVE. The grains composing the RVE are generated by considering the full set of design variables involved at this scale, i.e. the material properties of the constitutive phases (grains and matrix) and the main geometric parameters related to the grain (volume fraction, average diameter, geometric and material orientations). Numerical results show that the macroscopic effective thermoelastic properties of the cork-based agglomerate are strongly affected by the previous parameters in perfect agreement with experimental results available in literature.