Effective thermal conductivity of composites using homogenization

• Advanced deterministic procedure for thermal analysis in composites. • New approach considers inclusion volume, shape, orientation, and location. • Validated against established analytical models, FEM , and experimental data. • Proven high accuracy in homogenizing composite effective thermal properties. Composite materials are extensively used in engineering applications due to their customizable properties and high performance. Determining the equivalent homogenized properties of composites, such as thermal conductivity, is crucial for their effective use. Various theoretical, analytical, and experimental methods have been developed to assess these properties. This study investigates the effective thermal conductivity of composites using a deterministically based procedure for thermal analysis. This procedure accounts for the combined influences of the inclusions’ volume fractions, shapes, orientations, and locations within the matrix to determine the effective thermal conductivity of composites. The specific composite analyzed consists of a cubical PLA matrix with a single spherical or elliptical void inclusion with perfect interfaces. For that purpose, an analytical approach was developed, and MATLAB® code was created to calculate the effective thermal conductivity tensor. To benchmark the analytical results, comparisons were made against numerical finite element modeling (FEM) results conducted using ANSYS®; in addition, to previously reported analytical models from the literature. Corroboration was also obtained by comparing the results against experimental data from the literature. The accuracy of the proposed homogenization scheme was demonstrated by achieving a low mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) compared to FEM (2.88%) and to the experimental results (2.72% for void inclusion and 6.99% for filled inclusion). Additionally, a high R-squared (R 2 ) value of 0.986 was achieved compared to FEM, and values of 0.97 and 0.998 were achieved compared to the experimental results for void and filled inclusions, respectively.