Diffusion Modelling of Composite with Permeable Fiber

Abstract

In order to predict the long-term durability of composite materials subjected to humid environments, the diffusing behavior has to be regarded. The knowledge of the effective diffusivity is actually required for estimating the moisture content of polymer based fiber reinforced materials following a Fick’s law. In this work, the effective diffusivity is determined by solving unit cell problems on representative volume elements with several multi-scale approaches. Composite materials with permeable fibers are studied. The proposed approaches are extended to the practical case of composite materials containing voids.