Numerical Investigation of Effective Thermal Conductivity of Strut-Based Cellular Structures Designed by Spatial Voronoi Tessellation

Abstract

Porous materials possess light weight and excellent thermal insulation performance. For disordered porous structures, the number of seed points is an important design parameter which is closely related to the morphology and mean pore size of the structure. Based on the arrangement of points in three-dimensional space, seven kinds of structures were designed by spatial Voronoi tessellation in this paper. The effect of the number of seed points on effective thermal conductivity for Voronoi was studied. Numerical simulation was conducted to research the effects of structural porosity, filling material and structural orientation on the effective thermal conductivity and heat transfer characteristics. The results showed that the effective thermal conductivity is closely related to the porosity and the matrix material. Different number and arrangement of seed points make the structure have different anisotropic performance due to different thermal paths. In addition, required the least number of seed points was obtained for the designation of isotropic random Voronoi.