Analysis of coupled heat and moisture transfer in masonry structures

Evaluation of effective or macroscopic coefficients of thermal conductivity under coupled heat and moisture transfer is presented. The paper first gives a detailed summary on the solution of a simple steady state heat conduction problem with an emphasis on various types of boundary conditions applied to the representative volume element -- a periodic unit cell. Since the results essentially suggest no superiority of any type of boundary conditions, the paper proceeds with the coupled nonlinear heat and moisture problem subjecting the selected representative volume element to the prescribed macroscopically uniform heat flux. This allows for a direct use of the academic or commercially available codes. Here, the presented results are derived with the help of the SIFEL (SIimple Finite Elements) system.Comment: 23 pages, 11 figure

Simulation of Polycrystals Using an FEM-based Representative Volume Element

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Stokes flow through a Boolean model of spheres: Representative volume element

International audienceThe Stokes flow is numerically computed in porous media based on 3D Boolean random sets of spheres. Two configurations are investigated in which the fluid flows inside the spheres or in the complementary set of the spheres. Full-field computations are carried out using the Fourier method of Wiegmann (2007). The latter is applied to large system sizes representative of the microstructure. The overall permeability of the two models as well as the representative volume element are estimated as a function of the pore volume fraction. We give numerical estimates for the asymptotic behavior of the permeability in the dilute limit for the solid phase, and close to the percolation threshold of the pores. FFT maps of the velocity field are presented, for increasing values of the pore volume fraction. The patterns of the local velocity field is analyzed using various morphological criteria. The tortuosity of the streamlines is found to be much higher than the geometrical tortuosity, for both models. The histograms of the velocity field are computed at increasing pore volume fraction. The covariance of orientation is used to characterize the spatial correlation of the velocity field

Micro-Mechanics Based Representative Volume Element Modeling Of Heterogeneous Cementitious Materials

The current work focuses on evaluation of the effective elastic properties of cementitious materials through a voxel based FEA approach. Voxels are generated for a heterogeneous cementitious material (Type-I cement) consisting of typical volume fractions of various constituent phases from digital microstructures. The microstructure is modeled as a micro-scale representative volume element (RVE) in ABAQUS to generate cubes several tens of microns in dimension and subjected to various prescribed deformation modes to generate the effective elastic tensor of the material. The RVE-calculated elastic properties such as moduli and Poisson\u27s ratio are validated through an asymptotic expansion homogenization (AEH) and compared with rule of mixtures. Both Periodic (PBC) and Kinematic boundary conditions (KBC) are investigated to determine if the elastic properties are invariant due to boundary conditions. In addition the method of Windowing was used to assess the randomness of the constituents and to validate how the isotropic elastic properties were determined. The average elastic properties obtained from the displacement based FEA of various locally anisotropic micro-size cubes extracted from an RVE of size 100x100x100 microns shothat the overall RVE response was fully isotropic. The effects of domain size, degree of hydration, kinematic and periodic boundary conditions, domain sampling techniques, local anisotropy, particle size distribution (PSD), and random microstructure on elastic properties are studied

Fe2-homogenization of micromorphic elasto-plastic materials

In this work, a homogenization strategy for a micromorphic–type inelastic material is presented. In the spirit of FE2, a representative volume element is attached to each macroscopic quadrature point. Due to the inherent length scale of the micromorphic continuum, size effects for inelastic behavior are obtained on RVE–level. A focus is placed on the computation of the homogenized algorithmic tangent. It is determined via sensitivity analyses with respect to the boundary conditions imposed on the RVE. Following this procedure, costly single–scale computations with dense meshes can be replaced by a robust homogenization approach with optimal convergence rates

Orthotropic criteria for transverse failure of non-crimp fabric-reinforced composites

In this paper, a set of failure criteria for transverse failure in non-crimp fabric-reinforced composites is presented. The proposed failure criteria are physically based and take into account the orthotropic character of non-crimp fabric composites addressing the observed lack of transverse isotropy. Experimental data for transverse loading out-of-plane in combination with in-plane loads are scarce. Therefore, to validate the developed criteria, experimental data are complemented with numerical data from a representative volume element model using a meso-micromechanical approach. The representative volume element model also provides a deeper understanding of how failure occurs in non-crimp fabric composites. Strength predictions from the developed set of failure criteria show good agreement with the experimental and numerical data

Estimation of Acoustic Properties, of the Representative Volume Element of Random Fibrous Media

International audienceThis work focuses on the estimation of acoustic properties from numerical simulations, and on the determination of the representative volume element of random fibrous media. At the microscopic scale, both viscous and thermal dissipations of energy occur in the air saturating the pores of a porous medium. Thus, the thermoacoustic formalism was used to model the physical behavior of several periodic unit cells of random fibrous media. Their properties such as both harmonic acoustic velocity and temperature were homogenized at different scales, in order to estimate representative volume elements for different properties