The thermal conservation equation in a solid material is written as follows:
where is the temperature, is the heat capacity of the material and vector is the heat flux. Note that and are used for transient thermal calculations only. Generally, the heat flux is related to the gradient of temperature by Fourrier’s law:
where is the tensor of thermal conductivity coefficients. We consider that thermal conductivity tensor is symmetric. A justification of this symmetry can be found in [LLK86] with part of the demonstration in [LL13].
When thermal conductivity calculations are performed with laminates, two homogenized quantities must first be calculated:
These two quantities are obtained by integrating material properties along laminate thickness.