Thermal conductivity calculation of bio-aggregates based materials using finite and discrete element methods

This work is about the calculation of thermal conductivity of insulating building materials made from plant particles. To determine the type of raw materials, the particle sizes or the volume fractions of plant and binder, a tool dedicated to calculate the thermal conductivity of heterogeneous materials has been developped, using the discrete element method to generate the volume element and the finite element method to calculate the homogenized properties. A 3D optical scanner has been used to capture plant particle shapes and convert them into a cluster of discret elements. These aggregates are initially randomly distributed but without any overlap, and then fall down in a container due to the gravity force and collide with neighbour particles according to a velocity Verlet algorithm. Once the RVE is built, the geometry is exported in the open-source Salome-Meca platform to be meshed. The calculation of the effective thermal conductivity of the heterogeneous volume is then performed using a homogenization technique, based on an energy method. To validate the numerical tool, thermal conductivity measurements have been performed on sunflower pith aggregates and on packed beds of the same particles. The experimental values have been compared satisfactorily with a batch of numerical simulations.