A New Theoretical Method for Studying Effects of Microstructure on Effective Thermal Conductivity of Vermicular Graphite Cast Iron

To provide the basis for thermal conductivity regulation of vermicular graphite cast iron (VGI), a new theoretical method consisting of shape interpolation, unit cell model and numerical calculation was proposed. Considering the influence of the graphite anisotropy and interfacial contact thermal conductivity (ICTC), the effective thermal conductivity of a series of unit cell models was calculated by numerical calculation based on finite difference. The effects of microstructure on effective thermal conductivity of VGI were studied by shape interpolation. The experimental results were in good agreement with the calculated ones. The effective thermal conductivity of VGI increases in power function with the decrease in graphite shape parameter, and increases linearly with the increase in graphite volume fraction and thermal conductivity of matrix. When the graphite volume fraction increases by 1%, the thermal conductivity of nodular cast iron increases by about 0.18 W/(m·K), while that of gray cast iron increases by about 3 W/(m·K). The thermal conductivity of cast iron has the same sensitivity to the thermal conductivity of matrix regardless of the graphite shape parameter. The thermal conductivity of matrix increased by 15 W/(m·K) and the thermal conductivity of cast iron increased by about 12 W/(m·K). Moreover, the more the graphite shape deviates from the sphere, the greater the enhancement effect of graphite anisotropy on thermal conductivity than the hindrance effect of interface between graphite and matrix. This work can provide guidance for the development of high thermal conductivity VGI and the study of thermal conductivity of composites containing anisotropic dispersed phase particles with complex shapes.

Numerical modelling of the fibre-matrix interaction in biaxial loading for hyperelastic soft tissue models

This paper assumes that a neo-Hookean matrix with neo-Hookean fibres is representative of soft tissue. Under this assumption, a unit cell model is proposed to investigate the fibre-matrix interfacial stress field for biological soft tissue under biaxial loadings. In this unit cell model, the soft tissue is treated as a composite where the matrix is unidirectionally reinforced with a single family of aligned fibres. The results are compared with the model of Guo et al., which accounts for the fibre-matrix interfacial stress field, and Qiu and Pence's model, which does not proceed from the assumption that the fibres are themselves neo-Hookean. It is found that the stress representative of the fibre-matrix interface plays an important role in the deformation of the composite, and the model of Guo et al. underestimates this stress under large biaxial deformation.