Copyright © 2013 Duc Phi Do and Dashnor Hoxha. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The present work aims to study the nonlinear effective thermal conductivity of heterogeneous composite-like geomaterials by using a numerical approach based on the immersed interface method (IIM). This method is particularly efficient at solving the diffusion problem in domains containing inner boundaries in the form of perfect or imperfect interfaces between constituents. In this paper, this numerical procedure is extended in the framework of non linear behavior of constituents and interfaces. The performance of the developed tool is then demonstrated through the studies of temperature- and pressure-dependent effective thermal conductivity of geomaterials with imperfect interfaces.