Modeling of heat transfer within porous multi-constituent materials

The CEA works a great deal with porous materials - carbon composites, ceramics - and aims to optimize their properties for specific uses. These materials can be composed of several constituents and generally has a complex structure with pore size of several tens of micrometers. It is used in large-scale systems that are bigger than its own characteristic scale in which they are considered as equivalent to a homogeneous medium for the simulation of its behavior in its using environment without taking into account its local morphology. We are especially interested in the effective thermal diffusivity of heterogeneous materials that we estimate as a function of temperature with the help of an inverse method by considering they are homogeneous. The identification of the diffusivity of porous and/or semi-transparent materials is made difficult because of the strong conducto-radiative coupling can quickly occur when the temperature increases. We have thus modeled the coupled conductive and radiative heat transfer as a function of the temperature within porous multi-constituent materials from their morphology discretized into a set of homogeneous voxels. We have developed a methodology that consists in starting from a 3D-microstructure of the studied materials obtained by tomography. The microstructures constitute the numerical support to this modeling that renders it possible, on the one hand, to simulate any kind of numerical thermal experiments, especially the flash method whose the results render it possible to estimate the thermal diffusivity, and on the other hand, to reproduce the thermal behavior of our materials in their using conditions. (author)