Quantifying the impact of rigid interparticle structures on heat transfer in granular materials using networks

Coordination number can be used to quantify the particle connectivity and deformability of a granular material. However, it is a local feature of particles at the microscale, and the use of an average coordination number does not allow for full characterization of the microstructural variation in the granular material. Mesoscale structures can be used to overcome this limitation: triangular-like structures at the mesoscale tend to be rigid, whereas square-like structures tend to be deformable. However, the effect of these structures on heat transfer has not been studied in deforming granular materials. A better understating of how microstructure variation affects effective thermal conductivity is necessary. This work constructs contact networks representing the granular materials with particles as nodes and linking neighbouring nodes with edges that represent particle contacts. Then, '3-cycles' (i.e., a triangular structure) and 'clustering coefficients' are extracted from the contact network. As contact thermal conductance is vital to heat transfer and affected by particle shape, microscale three-dimensional particle shape descriptors are also calculated. To compute the effective thermal conductivity of the granular assembly, a thermal network model is established by adding 'near-contact' edges to the contact network and assigning a thermal conductance to each edge. The results show that mesoscale local clustering coefficients can indicate the rigidity of granular materials and, together with particle shape descriptors, can be used to predict well the effective thermal conductivity of granular materials under deformation. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.