Microstructure and transport properties of cellular materials: Representative volume element

Abstract

The representative volume element (RVE) plays a central role in efforts to predict the effective thermo-physical and transport properties of heterogeneous materials. A quantitative definition of its size is proposed in this work. It is shown that RVE depends on the morphological or physical property being investigated. The methodology is applied to real samples of open-celled materials (such as metallic foam) whose structure is obtained from X-Ray microtomography. © 2009 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.