PSI - Issue 80

Stanislav Buklovskyi et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 80 (2026) 146–156 Author name / Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2019) 000 – 000

150

5

0.46

CM ECAP

0.44

0.42

0.40

k [W/mK]

0.38

0.36

012345678910

wt % of CB

Fig. 3 Thermal conductivity of CB/UHMWPE composites produced by CM and ECAE for different wt % of CB inclusions.

3. Numerical modeling 3.1. Development of the RVE

In this study, the effective thermal properties of CB/UHMWPE are found utilizing numerical modeling approach that was previously developed by Buklovskiy et al. (2024) for effective elastic properties. The approach is based on μCT data and allows for development of representative volume elements that incorporate the observed CB containing layers. A detailed description of the approach is given in Buklovskyi et al. (2023) and a short description is provided here for completeness. The raw volumetric μCT images in TIFF format undergo a sequence of preprocessing steps including cropping, smoothing, and intensity leveling. After preprocessing, the images are binarized by classifying UHMWPE granules as black and the CB-containing layers as white. A final noise-cleaning step is applied to the binary images to ensure accuracy in the subsequent statistical analysis of UHMWPE granules in a processing and analysis pipeline developed within the open-source software Dream3D Groeber & Jackson (2014). An example of a resulting image is shown in Fig. 4a. Synthetic RVEs, shown in Fig. 4b, are generated based on the results of the statistical analysis utilizing a separate Dream3D pipeline. Once the RVE geometry is built, the CB-containing layers are introduced in a separate step. The Dream3D-generated RVE is exported to MATLAB as a structured VTK file. Interface surfaces between UHMWPE granules are then identified, and the CB-containing interface region is created by reassigning boundary voxels layer by layer, continuing until the desired average thickness, determined from μCT analysis, is achieved. An example of the resultant RVE, shown in Fig. 4c, is a cubic domain of 480 3 voxels, with each CB-containing layer being 8 to 10 voxels in thickness.