Analysis of fibre waviness effect through homogenization approach for the prediction of effective thermal conductivities of FRP composite using finite element method

In this study, homogenization approach is proposed to analyse the fibre waviness in predicting the effective thermal conductivities of composite. Composites that have wavy fibre were analysed by finite element method to establish equivalence between micro- and macro-mechanics principles, thereby, it is possible to minimize the computational efforts required to solve the problem through only micro-mechanics approach. In the present work, the influence of crest offset, wavy-span on the thermal conductivities of composite for different volume fractions and thermal conductivity mismatch ratios were also studied. It is observed that the homogenization results are in good agreement with minimal % error from those obtained through pure micro-mechanics approach at the cost of low computational facilities and less processing time for converged solutions.