A study on the conduction efficiency of solid materials that evolves from a particulate system to an overlapping discs agglomerate

Abstract Effective transport coefficient (ETC) of particulate composites is a crucial parameter in many industrial applications. ETC is subject to many microstructural parameters of the system at different scales. In this work, stochastic reconstruction is applied to study possible microstructure configurations between two selected systems. The initial system is configured to a microstructure with overlapping discs agglomerates of monodisperse diameter D = 12 pixels; the final system is configured to a particulate system of monodisperse diameter D = 1 pixel. Easy but powerful diagrams are presented as a quick design tool. The diagram user only requires the determination of two statistical magnitudes: probability of the neighbor connectivity, and infinite cluster, both statistical functions are detailed in the manuscript. This particulate composite information is defined from microstructure images. Proposed diagrams allow the user to get a position in a “map” that describes how ETC magnitude change according to: 1) size of the agglomerate diameter, 2) phase surface fraction, 3) mono-distributed and poly-distributed configuration, and 4) matrix phase or dispersed phase condition as the conductive phase. The diagram user can immediately obtain a full panorama without solving complex equations, which would let to make decisions about the modification of the geometric structure of the particulate composite. The microstructures studied are delimited to biphasic, isotropic particulate composites. The experimental validation of the diagram's effectiveness with particulate composites from the literature is accomplished.