A Superposition Procedure for Calculation of Effective Diffusion and Elastic Parameters of Sparsely Porous Materials

Abstract

Effective material parameters for diffusion and elastic deformation are calculated for porous materials using a continuum theory-based superposition procedure. The theory that is limited to two-dimensional cases, requires that the pores are sufficiently sparse. The method leads to simple manual calculations that can be performed by, e.g. hospital staff at clinical diagnoses of bone deceases that involve increasing levels of porosity. An advantage is that the result relates to the bone material permeability and stiffness instead of merely pore densities. The procedure uses precalculated pore shape factors and exact size scaling. The remaining calculations do not require any knowledge of the underlying field methods that are used to compute the shape factors. The paper establishes the upper limit for the pore densities that are sufficiently sparse. A cross section of bovine bone is taken as an example. The superposition procedure is evaluated against a full scale finite element calculation. The study compares the pore induced change of the diffusion coefficient and elastic modulus. The predictions differ between superposition and full scale calculations with 0.3% points when pore contribution to the diffusion constant is 3–7%, and 0.7% points when the pore contribution to the modulus of elasticity is 4.5–5%. It is uncertain if the error is in the superposition method, which is exact for small pore densities, while the full scale finite model is not.