Electrothermics

5.12. Conclusion

In light of the growing preoccupations of the composite material industry, optimizing their elaboration and assembly methods is of the utmost importance. In this context, induction heating, when mastered, can bring new development solutions.

Mastering this process requires perfect knowledge of the electromagnetic and thermal properties of these materials, as well as the development of a modeling tool suited to the problem’s complexity.

Composite materials are by nature heterogeneous, multiscaled, and anisotropic. Modeling these materials at the microscopic scale is therefore very difficult or even impossible. To make modeling feasible, we must rely on a preliminary homogenization phase. This homogenization can be done by experimental measurements or using predictive methods.

A measurement methodology was then developed, notably to identify the electrical conductivity. This inductive measurement-based methodology yields satisfactory results.

The experimental measurements are not predictive. Three predictive homogenization methods were developed from the structure and the intrinsic properties of the composite materials’ constituent materials:

– The inverse problem method based on an iterative algorithm to find the equivalent properties which would give field and temperature distributions closest to the true values. This method is applicable to all structures but requires a high computation time.

– The dynamic homogenization method based on the spatial filtering of ...