Thermal Conductivity Of Advanced Architected Cellular Materials

Abstract

— Architected cellular materials, as a novel class of low density materials, gain their unprecedented multifunctional performance mainly from their underlying architecture. In this paper, we focus on thermal conductivity of cellular materials. Standard mechanics homogenization with periodic boundary conditions is used to determine the thermal conductivity of cells with supershape pores. The computational results confirm that a wide range of possible anisotropic behaviour for thermal conductivity is achievable for cellular materials. Effective thermal conductivity of shellular materials based on three triply periodic minimal surfaces are also compared with those of cells with supershape pores. It is found that unlike the shellular materials, which only cover a narrow portion of thermal conductivity vs. relative density chart, cellular materials with anisotropic effective thermal conductivity could be engineered by employing supershape pores in cells.