PSI - Issue 80

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

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UHMWPE granules generated with Dream3D

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CB layers added in MATLAB

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Fig.4: Generation of the CB/UHMWPE composite RVE: (a) Processed μCT image, (b) statistically equivalent volume element, (c) RVE with CB-containing layers.

3.2. Thermal conductivity of constituents Thermal conductivity of the UHMWPE granules was assigned based on the measurements shown in Fig.3 for neat UHMWPE material ( = 0.37 / ). For CB-containing layers thermal conductivity properties were predicted using Mori-Tanaka approach for thermal conductivity (Böhm & Nogales, 2008). CB inclusions are assumed to be spherical (Spahr et al., 2017) and randomly distributed in UHMWPE matrix within the CB-containing layers. In this case, the effective thermal conductivity is found as follows: = + ( − ) ⋅ , (1) where is the 2 nd rank effective conductivity tensor of the layers, and are the conductivity tensors of matrix and inclusion materials respectively, is the 2 nd rank Mori-Tanaka thermal gradient concentration tensor that is found as: = ⋅ ( / + / ) −1 , (2) where / and / are the volume fractions of matrix and carbon in the layers respectively, is the second order identity tensor, is the 2 nd order thermal gradient concentration tensor that is given by: = [ + : ( ) −1 ⋅ ( − )] −1 , (3) where is the 2 nd order Eshelby tensor for conductivity in the case of spherical particles (Hatta & Taya, 1986).