Estimation of acoustic properties and of the representative volume element of random fibrous media

This work focuses on the estimation of acoustic properties from numerical simulations, and on the determination of the representative volume element of random fibrous media. At the microscopic scale, both viscous and thermal dissipations of energy occur in the air saturating the pores of a porous medium. Thus, the thermoacoustic formalism was used to model the physical behavior of several periodic unit cells of random fibrous media. Their properties such as both harmonic acoustic velocity and temperature were homogenized at different scales, in order to estimate representative volume elements for different properties. (C) 2013 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4794501]