In general, the thermal conductivity decreases as the volume ratio of insulations increases, while the mechanical properties, such as strength and directional modulus, have a direct proportion to the insulation volume. ( 2016) investigated the effect of optimized porosity distribution of insulation materials by the variational method. ( 2013) examined the correlation between the pore characteristics and the directional modulus of lightweight aggregates and evaluated the effect of the pore distribution on thermal properties of insulating specimens using micro-CT imagesВ Chung etВ al. Won and Chau ( 2005) examined the concrete specimens with different constituent distributions. ( 2002) investigated the pore clustering effect on the material properties of ceramic. Thus, it is important to correctly investigate the spatial distribution of insulation materials, and many researchers have studied the insulation/pore distribution and its effect on the material properties. Insulating concrete contains numerous pores inside the material, and the volume ratio and the spatial distribution of these insulations strongly affect the characteristics of concrete. The type of insulation contained in the specimen and its characteristics play a significant role in reducing heat transfer and material properties of insulating concreteВ (Narayanan and Ramamurthy 2000 Baetens etВ al. Insulating concrete is a material designed to enhance insulation effect by using insulating components, such as lightweight aggregates, and entrained pores. In particular, insulating concrete has been widely used to reduce energy consumption. Many new buildings and construction materials have been suggested and used over the last decadesВ (Roma-Jr and Martello 2008 Sales etВ al. In recent years, energy consumption is considered as a serious problem in many engineering fields, and many efforts have been conducted to improve energy efficiency. From the results, it is demonstrated that the use of anisotropic insulations for a specific direction can enhance the insulation efficiently as well as minimizing the loss of compressive strength. The thermal and mechanical responses for different directions are investigated using both experimental and numerical methods. X-ray computed tomography images and probabilistic description methods are used to confirm the arrangement of the insulations. In addition, different types of insulation materials and their effect on the materials are also investigated here. A set of mortar specimens with different arrangements of coin-shaped insulations are produced to examine the anisotropic insulation effect on the material characteristics. To overcome this contrary, anisotropic insulations with different spatial distributions are proposed and investigated in this study. In general, the insulation effect is directly proportion to the pore volume, while the material strength decreases as the porosity increases. In the two first examples, the simulated measured data are used, while in the third example, the experimental data obtained from a polyvinyl alcohol sample are used.Insulating concrete is a material designed to reduce heat conduction with pores/insulations, and these pores strongly affect the material characteristics. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through three examples. The method uses the results of different experiments simultaneously to obtain the material parameters more accurately. By using boundary measured data from a sample with non-standard geometry, and by using an iterative inverse analysis technique, the material constants are obtained. In this paper, a method is presented to obtain the mechanical constants of Mooney-Rivlin and Holzapfel hyper-elastic material models which are employed to describe the behavior of isotropic and anisotropic hyper-elastic materials, respectively. Identification of mechanical properties of isotropic and anisotropic materials that demonstrate non-linear elastic behavior, such as rubbers and soft tissues of human body, is critical for many industrial and medical purposes.

Anisotropic material examples