Moisture diffusion behavior of permeable fiber-reinforced polymer composite

Abstract

A unit cell approach is employed to predict the effective moisture diffusion property in fiber-reinforced biopolymer. The permeable fibers distributed in the matrix are taken as inclusion phases in the system. Based on a unit cell model, the calculation method for moisture diffusion coefficients is developed in this paper. Moisture diffusion property and effective diffusion coefficients are numerically investigated under different temperature and volume fractions of fibers. The calculated results agree well with Gueribiz’s solutions. Therefore, it is reliable in predicting moisture diffusion property of composite using the unit cell model. The present result shows that the effective diffusion coefficient of a composite depends on both temperature and volume fraction of fibers. The effective diffusion coefficient of regular hexagon pattern composite is larger than that of square pattern at the same temperature and volume fraction.

Keywords

fiber-reinforced biopolymer / effective diffusion coefficient / unit cell / finite element modeling (FEM)