Micromechanical models for predicting the thermal conductivity properties of construction materials: A comparison with experimental data

This paper focused on analytic modeling of the effective thermal conductivity of bio-composite building materials. The analytic model adopted in this paper is the homogenization method. The principal idea of this method is to characterize the effective thermal conductivity from a microstructural description of the heterogeneous material and the knowledge of the local behavior of constituents (matrix and fiber) using a micromechanical approach. A three schemes (the dilute scheme, Auto-coherent scheme and the Mori-Tanaka scheme) are introduced and compared with Voigt-Reuss and Hashin-Shtrikman bounds and with experimental data at low fraction. A good agreement between the three schemes and Voigt-Reuss and Hashin-Shtrikman bounds and experimental values was revealed. The maximum deviations remain lower than 4.4% between Mori-Tanaka scheme and experimental data.