Prediction of thermal conduction in a four-phase composite with lowly-conducting interfaces based on variational asymptotic method

Due to the complex physical and chemical reactions, surface contamination and debonding, the interfaces within the four-phase composite, represented by hollow-glass-bead reinforced cement based material (HGB-CBM), cannot be assumed to be perfect. In order to consider the effect of imperfect interfaces, a novel thermal conduct model is developed. An imperfect interface is used to replace the pre-existing transition layer in the composite material, and the discontinuous temperature field proportional to the normal heat flow is preserved by using Hadamard's relation and Taylor's expansion. Based on the principle of minimum functional and variational asymptotic method, the governing variational statement for thermal conduct model is derived, and validated through comparison with RVE-based FEM and experimental results. It can be concluded that HGB-CBM with lowly-conducting imperfect interfaces has lower effective thermal conductivity, smaller heat flux within HGB and more significant changes at imperfect interfaces, which may be due to longer and more complex heat flux paths along the imperfect interfaces. HGB-CBM with larger volume fraction of HGB and smaller thermal conductivity of bead wall can provide better thermal insulation effect, which could provide reference for using HGB-CBM as thermal-insulating material in building engineering.