Calculating Effective Thermal and Mechanical Properties of Fibrous Materials Using Lattice Particle Method

Fibrous materials are extensively employed as thermal protection system in aerospace engineering. In this paper, the effective thermal and mechanical properties of a carbon fibrous material are predicted based on representative volume element of the micro-structure using a nonlocal lattice particle method. The RVE is obtained by scanning the fibrous sample and outputting the structure information as voxel-based binary files. Specifically, we calculate the effective thermal conductivity tensor by solving a heat conduction problem with prescribed temperature boundary condition. We obtain the effective mechanical properties by running several designed tests with applied strain state.