Estimation of effective thermal conductivity tensor from composite microstructure images

The determination of the effective thermal properties of inhomogeneous materials is a long-standing problem of continuously interest. The impressive number of methods developed to measure or estimate the thermal properties of composite materials clearly exhibits the importance given to their knowledge. Homogenization models are a cheap way to determine or predict them. Many different approaches of homogenization were developed, but the last advances are credited to numerical methods. In this study, a new computational model is developed to estimate the 2D thermal conductivity tensor and the thermal main directions of a pure carbon/epoxy unidirectional composite. This tool is based on real composite microstructure.