Homogenization of Moisture Diffusing Behavior of Composite Materials with Impermeable or Permeable Fibers - Application to Porous Composite Materials

In order to predict the long-term durability of polymer matrix composite materials submitted to humid environments, the moisture diffusion behavior has to be investigated. The knowledge of the effective diffusivity is actually required, for estimating the moisture content of polymer-based fiber-reinforced materials, even when a basic behavior such as Fick's law is assumed to occur. The original contribution of the present work is to provide new analytical solutions for the effective diffusivities from the solving of unit cell problems on representative volume elements by means of several multi-scale approaches. Composite materials with impermeable or permeable fibers are extensively investigated. The proposed approaches are extended to the practical case of composite materials containing realistic voids volume fractions.